Uploaded August 2012 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

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According to wikipedia:

A Table canon is a retrograde and inverse canon meant to be placed on a table in between two musicians, who both read the same line of music in opposite directions. As both parts are included in each single line, a second line is not needed.

I thought there should be no reason to limit one musician to one line of music (or to limit one side of the table to one musician), so I created a table canon with two lines of music per musician (or two musicians per side of the table).

You hear three parts: part I is a 2-voice theme, part II is the same 2-voice theme upside-down, finally part III consists of part I playing simultaneously with part II. THE ACTUAL PIECE CONSISTS OF PART III ONLY. The rest is added for demonstration purposes. You will notice that the 2-voice themes sometimes sound a bit awkward. Compared to my previous musical constructions, it was harder to construct a theme that sounds reasonably interesting and reasonably well together with itself playing backwards and upside down in 4 voices.

I have published an article explaining the method I used to create this on my blog: a-touch-of-music.blogspot.be/2012/08/how-to-write-table-canon.html