J. S. Bach’s Musical Offering on a Möbius Strip

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). A famous example is found in J. S. Bach’s The Musical Offering, which also contains a canon (“Quaerendo invenietis”) combining retrogression with inversion, i.e., the music is turned upside down by one player – also known as a table canon.

What is remarkable about this is that Bach makes something so intricately complex sound so sublime.

The Father’s Love

When little problems leap out of life’s precarious vortex to assail us, I often write a song. I have no idea why, but I do know that I haven’t the time now since I have to grope my way through some excruciatingly boring Discovery documents.

So I am appropriating a song I wrote for one of our daughters when she was having a difficult time a few years back:

The Father’s love
The Father’s love is deeper than the deepest ocean floor.
The Father’s love is brighter than the brightest morning star.
Chorus
Love so strong, to give your Son to death; he knew no sin.
To open heaven’s door for us where we are welcomed in.

The Father’s love, it reaches to the distant galaxies.
The Father’s love is always here, it even rescues me.
© 2008 David Jenkins

R.I.P. Dave Brubeck

The great jazz pianist and composer died today aged 91 of heart failure.

Here he is in 1966 playing “Take Five”, a tune in 5/4 time not written by him, but made  famous by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
 

 
And while on the subject of Dave Brubeck, here is a solo by his drummer, Joe Morello who died last year. I attended a drum clinic conducted by Joe Morello in the early ’60s and he was just as blisteringly brilliant in person: