On the night of a chamber music recital at the camp where I taught this summer, with 20-plus excited performers (ages 8-16 or so) hanging out pre-recital in a large classroom, I noticed younger students writing on the whiteboard (as students will do). When I teach music theory in the same space, I generally pull down the screen and AirPlay from my iPad to the screen; but in this case, I thought it would be a fun surprise suddenly to project something right onto the whiteboard while they were writing.
I decided to project an image of Mozart onto the screen, intentionally flashing it on and off fairly quickly to surprise and intrigue them. Fits of laughter. Then they started drawing on his face. This was a delightful development. Once a doodled face had been put on Mozart, I started flashing the picture on and off again and I will say, to my credit as an entertainer, that the children went wild with screaming laughter each time the image changed - to the point that, I had gone a little (?) too far and the poor student counselors had to start yelling at them to settle down. In short, I think Mozart would have approved of this mischief. It certainly made me feel younger...
When I posted the story above on Facebook, I thought it would be fun to make a little video animation (based on photos I'd taken) of the doodled Mozart, with and without Mozart. I thought briefly about what would make a good soundtrack, trying to think of some lighthearted and mischievous Mozart when the Allegro from the Overture to The Magic Flute came to mind. The playful fugato beginning of this section [at 1:03 here] seemed perfect, but I also know Facebook is pretty unforgiving about posting copyrighted material. So, rather than use a real recording, I downloaded an xml file of the score from Musescore (where all manner of user-created scores exist), imported it into Dorico and, using the reasonably good orchestral simulation provided by NotePerformer, I created a serviceable soundtrack. And that was that.
But, of course, it wasn't. Once I had all the potential energy of this score in hand, it was hard to resist thinking of ways to manipulate it. Because that Allegro theme has such a distinctive melodic profile with its repeated staccato notes, turns, and leaps, it seemed liked something which would flip upside down easily and still remain distinctive:
There was a long journey from there. Perhaps I'll write more about it later, but in summary.
- I first worked on flipping the whole orchestra upside down just from that theme for about 32 bars. Fun, silly. Enough.
- But, of course, it wasn't enough. After a lot of experimentation, I had the whole seven-minute overture (including the short, slow intro and the shorter slow interlude following the exposition) flipped and tempting me to do more.
- I decided I liked starting that Allegro on the same pitch (E-flat) as the original. In general, flipping major key music puts musical ideas into a dark mode called Phrygian which is like a minor key with an unnerving lowered second-scaled degree. Flipping an E-flat Major scale upside down (following the normal pattern of whole and half steps, but in the opposite direction) results in all seven notes being flatted. (E-flat Minor already has six flats normally; the final F-flat is what would make this a Phrygian pattern.)
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- However, it turned out to make better sense to think of that opening E-flat as the fifth of a scale which, instead of rising up a 5th in the second bar (as above) goes down a 5th to A-flat, so that the key will often sound more like A-flat Minor than E-flat Phrygian. Because A-flat Minor has seven flats, I re-spelled everything in the slightly more friendly enharmonic G-sharp Minor, which has five sharps. ("Enharmonic" means A-flat and G-sharp are essentially the same pitch in our system, but spelled differently.)
- So, the main Allegro theme now looks like this, starting on the same note but with everything inverted from there:
- Now the truth is, major doesn't just naturally turn into minor (or Phrygian) when music is flipped upside down for lots of reasons - most importantly, you end up with chord progressions that don't always make tonal sense, but that's part of the fun. Although it would be possible to re-orient everything into more logical harmonies (by re-spelling many notes), that would involve a tremendous amount of work, and also pull the final product away from being a precise inversion of what Mozart wrote. I'll stick with mirroring the master. (However, here you may hear a complete reworking of Schubert's iconic Erlkönig in which all minor sections have been artfully (?) converted to major and vice versa. Emphasis on vice.)
- Although in some ways, the final product can be derived by a few simple operations, there were still plenty of decisions to be made first. For example, I chose to flip EVERYTHING in relation to that opening D-sharp right above Middle C. This means that high flute and violin parts end up quite low and in bass clef while cellos and bassoons end up in treble clef, etc. (Violists get to stay in alto clef. Wouldn't want them to have to learn something new!) Fortunately, NotePerformer can "play" notes out of range for these instruments, although in the recording, I ended up supplementing the flute part with bassoon, the bassoon part with flute, etc. (These details are not included in the score you see - only in what you hear.)
- The one exception is that the generally low timpani notes sounded just plain stupid in a high register (kind of like thudding cowbells), so I brought all those inverted notes back down into a logical bass clef register.
- I chose to leave things in standard score order even though the registers have mostly flipped, so it takes a little getting used to seeing the upper parts in bass clef, but I like that this approach most closely matches the original score.
- There was still much to do from here. For one, the xml file I had downloaded had lots of mistakes and inconsistencies, so that took a LOT of cleaning up. Getting pitches spelled correctly is a big job, and I'm sure I've missed some things here and there, but I think it's a pretty faithful inversion.
- Creating the recording was also a big job as, not surprisingly, balances don't work out as well when all the registers have flipped.* In addition to supplementing parts which needed a boost, this involved tweaking articulations and dynamics in the "performance" score.
- MIDI data for an opulent, 8-part Schoenberg motet is transformed into an ultra-slow and ultra-fast version: Impossible Peace = Impossible Piece?
- Für Elise is chopped in half: Variations on Beethoven
- Many pieces (including Für Elise) are inverted via my magical inverted piano: Ghosts in the Machine
- A famous Bach invention is flipped, reversed, and more: Re-inventing Bach
- A famous Bach piece for solo violin is turned into a duet with its own inverted self: Bach Day #3: Bach to Bach
- Playing two movements of a Bach violin suite at once: Bach Doubled
- Ernst Toch's famous speech-chorus, Geographical Fugue, is turned into an instrumental: Geographical Fun
- I've performed so many operations on Satie's poor Gymnopédie No. 1 that I can hardly remember them all. Go HERE and sample a variety of randomized ones with a link to a fully backwards one at the bottom. Or, mentioned near the end of this post is an 18-second dash through the same piece.
* Here are couple of quick ways to think of the problems created by flipping music with wide range and lots of harmony. First of all, based on the principle of the Overtone Series which undergirds a lot about how harmony works, chords tend to be spaced more widely in lower registers and more closely up high. Flipping such chords results in the opposite, with more densely packed intervals in the muddier lower ranges. Secondly, if you think of the classic triad, which is framed by a fifth about a root note with the fifth reinforcing the root below (due to Overtone principles), flipping things put that fifth below the original tonic, making that lower note sound more like a root. This is why above I say that flipping E-flat Major upside down creates music where the tonic feels more like the A-flat a fifth below. However, an E-flat Major chord with an added E-flat on top (very common) means the inverted chord will sound like an A-flat Minor triad with the 5th in the bass, which is not a stable voicing. Thus, my "Manic Flute" overture above ends on a rather unfinished sounding chord.
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