Mozart’s “Table Music” Can be Read Upside Down
Today, my violin friend brought us a new piece of music to play. It was called Table Music for Two, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I play the first part on a flute, while my friend plays the second part on a violin.
It’s written as a duet. The neatest thing is that the second part can be read upside down off the same sheet! (So it’s called table music because the one sheet can be laid on a table between two players, read from each player’s side–very convenient for the days before photocopying!) In other words, a table canon is placed on a table between two players, each reading from opposite directions off the same sheet. Sometimes table canons are also called crab canons.
It’s a fairly simple piece of music, perfect for two amateur players wanting to enjoy playing together. If you want to hear it, here is a children’s orchestra playing it from YouTube:
Table Music is also known as a retrograde inversion canon. The first player plays the normal direction, from the first note to the last. The second player plays in the opposite direction (usually read upside down off the same sheet of music), from the last note to the first.
According to Science News for Kids author Emily Sohn, “In the process of analyzing the compositions, Ana ( a music student who analyzed Mozart’s Table Music, and wrote an retrograde inversion canon herself) discovered some unexpected mathematical patterns in Mozart’s piece. For one thing, he divided his piece into two sections, where one part is longer than the other. It turns out that the ratio of the length of one part to that of the other is a special number called the golden ratio.
Mozart himself was fascinated by numbers. As a kid when he was learning arithmetic, he once covered the walls of all the rooms in his house with figures. When Mozart was 14 and busy with music, he still found time to ask his sister to send him extra math exercises. The margins of one of Mozart’s musical compositions contain calculations of his chances of winning a lottery. He used math in a variety of ways to guide how he composed some of his musical pieces.” For more information, see the very interesting article at:
http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20040602/Feature1.asp
Madame Monet
Tags: crab canon, flute duets, retrograde inversion canon, table canon, table music, violin duets
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