Johann Sebastian Bach - The Musical Offering

The Musical Offering (German: Musikalisches Opfer), BWV 1079, is a collection of keyboard canons and fugues and other pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, all based on a single musical theme given to him by Frederick the Great (King Frederick II of Prussia), to whom they are dedicated.They were published in September 1747. The Ricercar a 6, a six-voice fugue which is regarded as the high point of the...

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Music cancrizans

Contrapuntal formsIn the canonic forms, the earliest known in music as an independent art, the laws of texture also determine the shape of the whole, so that it is impossible, except in the light of historical knowledge, to say which is prior to the other.The principle of canon being that one voice shall reproduce the material of another note for note, it follows that in a composition where all parts are canonic...

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The great Netherlands school

At the period of musical history which we have now reached, the Dutch, as I have had occasion to say in another work, "led the world in painting, in liberal arts, and in commercial enterprise. Their skill in mechanics was unequalled, and we naturally expect to see their musicians further the development of musical technic." The Dutch musicians at first revelled in the exercise of mechanical ingenuity in the...

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Crab canon

A crab canon (also known by the Latin form of the name, canon cancrizans; as well as retrograde canon, canon per recte et retro or canon per rectus et inversus) is an arrangement of two musical lines that are complementary and backward.If the two lines were placed next to each other (as opposed to stacked), the lines would form something conceptually similar to a palindrome. The name 'crab' refers to the...

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