Ha, a Crab Canon! Never heard of it before and I'm quite surprised how nice your example piece turned out. Looking forward to trying it. Could this be used for shorter phrases say 2-4 measures long or even shorter? Also seems like maybe an effective tool for atonal music?
That was absolutely fascinating! I'd never heard of a crab canon. But now you've got me eager to incorporate it into a piece. Like you, I find musical challenges like this a lot of fun.
2:55: I don't usually write notes right-to-left, and as if unconsciously expected for a short moment that Gareth would write that dotted C with the dot on the left. It was kind of a fleeting alarm buzzing in the back of my mind: oops, wait, something's wrong, there's no space for the dot on the left... why is it on the right?..🤦 The next second I had the best laugh of the day at myself, indeed! It's well-known that we read printed/written text by the whole word: it's the overall word's shape that is recognised by the brain as a unit, not individual letters. There was a lot of neuropsychology research that confirmed and reconfirmed that, from tracking eye movements to fMRI and brain activation. But I don't recall at all any research on music reading. I suspect we may also read whole bars or similar units, not note-by-note. Now I'm curious...
Maestro, congratulations for your videos are explained very clearly and then a truly beautiful thing: you speaks slowly that for a non-native English speaker it is highly appreciated. I submit a question to you: I am a student of composition and I always wonder with what key should I start my piece with? Are there any rules or is the choice random? Why did you put 2 flats there, why not 3 or 1, or sharps? And then this modulates in which key should I go? is it a problem that has always worried me, a problem of choice, how do it choose? Could one of his very clear videos make about it? Thanks and a greeting from Rome, Italy. Carlo
Related to the crab canon and possibly of more musical interest, in that the listener has a chance of hearing what is going on are pieces of which Haydn has left a few examples. Could you consider how you would set about writing palindromic music? It occurs to me that in music of this sort some adventurous harmonies could be an advantage in drawing attention to the palindromic structure.
I did a three part augmentation canon with the half speed answer in retrograde and the quarter speed answer in inversion. It nearly broke my brain but I got through and it sounded good.
