How to write a Crab Canon

What's a crab canon?

According to wikipedia:

A crab canon—also known by the Latin form of the name, canon cancrizans—is an arrangement of two musical lines that are complementary and backward, similar to a palindrome. Originally it is a musical term for a kind of canon in which one line is reversed in time from the other (e.g. FABACEAE <=> EAECABAF).

Ever since I read about this in the Goedel, Escher, Bach book by Douglas Hofstadter I've had some fascination with this form of music. I've tried to write some but I usually got stuck after about three notes. In some previous articles I discussed how I created a 5-part canon and a 6-part invention using a technique I have invented (or more likely: rediscovered). Now I have extended this technique to create crab canons and palindrome canons et voila! A brand-new no-sweat, no-tears 4-voice palindrome crab-canon in the somewhat exotic meter of 11/4 appears... (why 11/4? Because I can ;) )

You can hear it on Youtube:

or SoundCloud:

The article explaining the full construction of this piece is available for download here. You may have trouble downloading it with some versions of internet explorer. In that case use chrome or firefox instead.

Canon in 5

So I've been experimenting today with an idea I had on how to write a canon without needing to know a lot of music theory. I want to explain the method I used in a later post, but here's the result of a test drive with a short theme repeated 5 times.

To conceive this 5 part fugue using the method I invented (or more likely: rediscovered :-) ) was a matter of a few minutes. The creation of the score and the rendering to audio and video took a bit longer.

You can hear the synthesizer version here:

You can download the score by clicking this link. And here's a preview of the score:

Enjoy!