Entry tags:
a cool crab canon
"Crab canons", or "retrograde canons", are musical pieces in which you get one part by reading a different part backwards, from end to beginning. (There's a variant in which you actually rotate the sheet music 180 degrees so not only is the first note of one part the last note of the other, but also high notes in one part become low notes in the other -- for example, if both parts are in modern treble clef, a high F in one part, on the top line, becomes a low E, on the bottom line, in the other.) There's a well-known one by Bach, which inspired Douglas Hofstadter to write a crab canon in prose as one of the interludes in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. And the earliest one I know of is Guillaume de Machaut's "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement".
So![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere was sorting through photocopied sheet music a few weeks ago and came across an anonymous "Retrograde Canon" from the mid-15th-century Trent codices (in modern edition; we haven't tried reading the original notation yet). We tried it on recorders and were utterly charmed. It's unusual in that the beats are offset: the "reflection point" is between beats 3 and 4 of a 4/4 measure, so every note that falls on a downbeat half note in the forward direction is on an upbeat half note in the retrograde direction. And the third part, written to go against the two canonic parts, is not a palindrome (as it is in the Machaut and Bach examples), but rather does different things with the same harmonies forward and backward. And when we played through it, putting breaths where they seemed to make sense in our individual parts, miraculously most of the breaths matched up. Anyway, last night we decided to do a multi-tracked recording of it: we recorded the two canonic parts (and yes, I read the "forward" line from end to beginning, rather than the editor's helpful reversal of it), then I recorded the third part while listening to the first two through earbuds, then combined the two recordings. Take a listen.
So
shalmestere was sorting through photocopied sheet music a few weeks ago and came across an anonymous "Retrograde Canon" from the mid-15th-century Trent codices (in modern edition; we haven't tried reading the original notation yet). We tried it on recorders and were utterly charmed. It's unusual in that the beats are offset: the "reflection point" is between beats 3 and 4 of a 4/4 measure, so every note that falls on a downbeat half note in the forward direction is on an upbeat half note in the retrograde direction. And the third part, written to go against the two canonic parts, is not a palindrome (as it is in the Machaut and Bach examples), but rather does different things with the same harmonies forward and backward. And when we played through it, putting breaths where they seemed to make sense in our individual parts, miraculously most of the breaths matched up. Anyway, last night we decided to do a multi-tracked recording of it: we recorded the two canonic parts (and yes, I read the "forward" line from end to beginning, rather than the editor's helpful reversal of it), then I recorded the third part while listening to the first two through earbuds, then combined the two recordings. Take a listen.