Some composers were not only great in their music-writing abilities but even went beyond great in ‘having fun’ with some of their creations, already great.
Let’s look at Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 47. Besides being an outstanding and quite a complex composition in general, it has a specific menuet (“Minuetto al Roverso”) which is now called a palindrome. Haydn wrote it in such a way that the 2nd half of the piece is the mirror of the 1st one. It means that it sounds the same when played backwards:
Some other examples of palindrome can be found in works by Alban Berg, James Tenney, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern and others.
Another fun phenomenon can be seen in Bach’s collection of fugues and canons known as “The Musical Offering”. Today the term is known as ‘table canon’ and formally means that the music combines inversion with retrogression. But in practice, it’s explained easier: if two musicians are placed in front of each other and the music score is put on the table between them, they will be reading the same line in opposite directions and play the piece together. The same musical set by Bach also contains a ‘crab canon’ which is quite similar to the palindrome, where two lines are backward and complement each other.
And there’s also a ‘mirror canon’ (e.g. “Quaerendo invenietis” from the same set by Bach). Just like the table canon, it can be popularly explained with the help of the mirror: the sheet music is placed in front of a mirror, while the leading voice is played along its own inversion (the upside down reflection of the score).
I find it quite an exciting revelation of a composer’s genius, don’t you?
Do you know of more curious examples?
Let’s look at Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 47. Besides being an outstanding and quite a complex composition in general, it has a specific menuet (“Minuetto al Roverso”) which is now called a palindrome. Haydn wrote it in such a way that the 2nd half of the piece is the mirror of the 1st one. It means that it sounds the same when played backwards:
Some other examples of palindrome can be found in works by Alban Berg, James Tenney, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern and others.
Another fun phenomenon can be seen in Bach’s collection of fugues and canons known as “The Musical Offering”. Today the term is known as ‘table canon’ and formally means that the music combines inversion with retrogression. But in practice, it’s explained easier: if two musicians are placed in front of each other and the music score is put on the table between them, they will be reading the same line in opposite directions and play the piece together. The same musical set by Bach also contains a ‘crab canon’ which is quite similar to the palindrome, where two lines are backward and complement each other.
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| Music Surrealism by Michael Cheval |
I find it quite an exciting revelation of a composer’s genius, don’t you?
Do you know of more curious examples?
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