Some other answers bring up use of these sorts of transformations in early music, often transforming a chant melody in a renaissance mass. Traditional classical style (and styles derived from it) is normally built on so-called "functional tonality." That means that chord progressions tend to have an ordering: it's normal to proceed I-IV-V-I, but much less common to do the reverse I-V-IV-I. Some genres of music are more flexible when it comes to ordering of things like harmonic progressions than others. The melody (or just the contour), the rhythm, or both can often be turned around to provide a motivic variant.īut reversing an entire melody can encounter other issues. To be clear, short motives are frequently reversed to generate thematic variation. They'll generally still be quite different, though. will still often continue to have a nice shape and no problems going backwards. That said, good melodies with a nice shape and few weird leaps etc. You can't just run it backwards and expect to have the same thing. Music is a temporal artform, meant to be listened to as it develops in order. It depends on what you mean by "beauty." Can a retrograde version of a melody still be beautiful? Yes, but unless the melody is rather symmetrical to begin with, the "beauty" of the retrograde version is likely to be found in different places or different effects. And as a commenter noted, there's no need to start the reversed melody on a certain beat to preserve the downbeat feel of the original, you could delay the above example of attack reversal by one eighth note. Note-attack reversal is far less common, but it can create interesting syncopations and help the composer break from rhythmic cliches. This changes the harmonies because if one voice had a held note while another was moving, the held note will change to the next held note in the static voice. Under note-attack reversal, it begins on beat 4+, the 8th of 8 eighth notes. For example, the whole note was on beat 1, which is the 1st of 8 eighth notes in the measure. Then, we proceed in eighth-note steps from the end of the bar and let each note enter when it would have been struck in the original. To do this, you need to pick a discrete time unit in this example I chose the eighth note, which is the smallest subdivision used. Therefore, another option is to reverse the note attacks. This is logical for instruments with a long sustain, like the voice, but it makes less sense for a percussion instrument like the snare drum, where the notated duration means nothing and the beat onset time is what matters. The more conventional choice is to reverse the notation, which is equivalent to reversing the note durations: moving backwards along the score, each note enters when it ended in the original. Something to consider in addition to things like inversion is that there are (at least) two kinds of time reversion: (This in one difference between long pieces commonly found in art music and short one found in pop or jazz or latin or country.) They don't work as well in some pop styles I have found as the pieces are not long enough to allow the various transformations to be heard. One can (this is more common) reverse motifs (or riffs) or invert them. Reversing a melody (not keeping the same note lengths though) is, I have found by trial, a nice way to make a second theme. I suppose (and would guess) that someone has tried combining lots of these ideas. Or one can sort by smaller to larger (which doesn't give a reversal). Bach's "Art of the Fugue" has lots of stuff like this.Įven more weirdly, Obrecht (I think) tried sorting a melody by note length all whole notes then half notes then quarter then eighths, etc., (tied and dotted notes are long I don't know about staccato). Reversing the melody can be combined with inversion. Similarly, the melody could be inverted around D above the C yielding: E-C-A (I think). The simplest is the axis around the first note each interval is inverted from the first note so that C-E-G would become C-Ab-F (real inversion intervals are exact) or even C-A-F (going down in both cases) which is called tonal inversion (intervals are the same but no accidentals are introduced minor and major quality may be exchanged.) Besides playing backwards, a melody may be "inverted" about an axis.
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