Solution to my Puzzle Canon on the Theme of the Musical Offering
On Feb 12 I posted a puzzle canon — a single melody that can be copied so it harmonizes with itself. For instance, this famous portrait of J. S. Bach shows him holding a puzzle canon.
Here is the full story of Bach’s canon, which is closely related to a group of canons Bach wrote on the bass line of the Goldberg variations.
I based my canon on the theme of The Musical Offering by J. S. Bach. Here it is in puzzle form.
Shown below is the solution. This canon has three voices — the second and third voices are copies of the first voice, progressively delayed by 6 quarter notes, and moved down an octave. In the first 32 bars of the written-out score the three voices enter one at a time. In the second 32 bars all the voices are sounding in an infinite loop. I added a brief closing cadence in the recording to end the canon. My goal in writing this canon was to try something Bach did not cover in The Musical Offering; in this case the new twist is to employ three canonic voices instead of just two. In case you are wondering, the canon does not work if you add a fourth voice.
April 7, 2015 @ 5:01 pm
Amazing. I can’t even imagine how you conceived of this. Did anyone come up with the solution? You were sorely missed at Dughof’s bash. D Moser
April 7, 2015 @ 5:12 pm
Congrats! I did not find heretofore. I spent a great, great deal of time with inversions, non-unison entries, and even diminutions, and made a little slide-rule of the opening scale, which, in any transposition or inversion, must combine with something somewhere, and didn’t find anything to my taste — in particular, the D/C clash in m 4 of the dux and the F/B in m 5 not resolved classically led me away from a -rectus- unison entry at dux 4.
Yes, "drats! tard!", but, great work. Missed you very much at the Bash.
April 8, 2015 @ 3:08 am
When do we get a 6-part version of this puzzle?
April 8, 2015 @ 10:01 pm
David — Bernie is the only one I know for sure worked on it. As for how I wrote it, the previous post talks about that a bit for the 180° canon. The principles for writing canons are the same here, and feel remarkably similar to constructing an ambigram — a lot of back and forth tweaking.
Bernie — I feel bad the D/C clash and F/B resolution threw you off. While I’m okay to go outside the constraints of Bach, I don’t want to do so needlessly. I am working on a way to improve both.
Phil — As soon as I get around to engraving the plates.
April 9, 2015 @ 3:26 pm
Scott — I was thrown off by (what Norden calls) the "canon unit", which I presumed to be a quarter-note, but was really a half-note, a 2/4 measure, which I should have figured (as it were) from the fact that the theme is in 2/4 and not 4/4. I looked a lot at your other canons to deduce "what contrapuntal rule-set is Scott using", too. As per my Latin cryptogram earlier, I got far on a "theme and diminution start at 0", at the octave/unison, but that ran aground. Parallel searching the space of "maybe this possibility is good", including "is this problem bad enough to abandone this path" and "maybe some other possibility is better" was problematic, too. I also guessed wrong on "Scott will do something really clever and non-obvious", while your actual solution is fairly conservative.
As per my Stanford talk, I find Bach "varies his constraint set" from measure to measure based upon the emotional "temperature" at which he wishes to cook.
April 27, 2015 @ 6:50 am
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April 27, 2015 @ 6:54 am
I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough. Marissa Mayer <a href="http://black7bet.com/">Bandar Bola</a>
April 5, 2016 @ 6:41 pm
I like music. but those solutio-to-puzzle-canon-on-the-theme-of-the-musical-offering are not me understand. but I like it.