Laurence Sherwood ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>Now to my question.  Is there any musical significance to writing in
>palindromes? My tin ears certainly could not identify that any one of
>Simpson's variations in his ninth quartet are palindromes, let alone the
>entire quartet, which runs nearly an hour.  Is writing in palindromes
>simply a curious challenge that Simpson made for himself? Why should a
>composer set such a constraint upon himself: simply for the intellectual
>challege of writing a palindrome that sounds, well, musical? Why should a
>listener care if it's a palindrome? Is anyone's appreciation of the music
>enhanced by the fact that music is a palindrome? I find it all very
>puzzling, but nonetheless intriguing.

I'm not aware that the entire quartet is a palindrome - and I don't see
how it can be, because that would mean that variation 20 (say) would have
to be the mirror-image of (say) variation 6.  But as each variation is
palindromic, that would mean the two variations were identical, which none
of them AFAIR are.

Plus the quartet begins with the Haydn (the entire minuet of Symphony No.47
BTW) and closes with a fugue (on the scale of Beethoven's Op.133).

As to hearing the palindrome, with familiarity you should start to hear
them.  Perhaps the easiest to hear is one of the faster variations (my CD
is at home so I can't check), which has a repeated descending figure up to
the turn around at which point it starts ascending (or perhaps vice-versa,
I haven't listened in a while).

...
>P.S.  to non-English speakers on this list.  A palindrome is a sequence
>that reads the same way forward and backward: e.g.  "Madam I'm Adam".  In
>a nod to Napolean one might write, "Able was I ere I saw Elba", which can
>be used as a template for numerous copies, such as, in a nod toward the
>American fundamentalist preacher Oral Roberts, "Slut was I ere I saw
>Tulsa"!

Surely that's "A slut I was...."?

Or my own favourites:  "A man, a plan, a canal - Panama" and "Satan
oscillate my metallic sonatas".

deryk barker
([log in to unmask], http://www.camosun.bc.ca/~dbarker)