Canon Cancrizans a 3 in C minor for Woodwind and String Trios.

As implied by its title, this arrangement was based off my Crab Canon (aka. Canon Cancrizans) a 3 in C minor ( • Three-voice Crab Canon in B minor.):

Since its initial publication, it has been transported one half step upwards to accomodate for the ranges of the instruments involved in this double trio, with the full realization played by the Continuo harpsichord part (which may be omitted entirely on account of the extremely wide intervals between voices in certain invertible configuartions making it rather difficult to play).

Enjoy!

YouTube video link:

Very nice piece. I know the struggle of composing a crab canon, it's no easy task. I think something that helps a lot is the use chromatism and the melodic minor mode with it's ascending and descending versions (which you already did), the reason being that they have more flexibility and different symmetries that can be exploited to get melodies that work well in both directions.

It sounds very good, very fluid, you don't even notice at first listen where the change point is. I think the dubbing between the instruments is a good decision.

Hi Pabio @Fugax Contrapunctus,

I like your arrangement here. It sounds more like Bach’s Crab canon in his Musial Offering than your original version. Thx for sharing.

Henry

This crab tastes very good. 😉 Really pleasant to listen to, especially as it is short enough that e.g. the steady staccato still doesn't exhaust the listener. 

Just one comment: It is your composition, so you can certainly do as you see fit, but many textbooks advise against realising a basso continuo as a piano reduction of the score. It is more about harmony than melody. This should help to avoid the wide intervals you mentioned. 

8 hours ago, Willibald said:

This crab tastes very good. 😉 Really pleasant to listen to, especially as it is short enough that e.g. the steady staccato still doesn't exhaust the listener.

Thank you! I'm glad the pervasive articulation didn't end up feeling too tiring or mechanical. Speaking of crab, I wonder if a crab canon using Bach's signature motif could be considered a Krebs im BACH canon. 😉😆

8 hours ago, Willibald said:

Just one comment: It is your composition, so you can certainly do as you see fit, but many textbooks advise against realising a basso continuo as a piano reduction of the score. It is more about harmony than melody. This should help to avoid the wide intervals you mentioned.

Even then, neither MuseScore 3 nor 4 have coherent thoroughbass notation implemented, let alone playback support for such a feature, which means my only way of adding the basso continuo's harpsichord sound has to be by reducing the score. Perhaps such wide intervals could be just as easily covered by a pedal harpsichord, considering we're only dealing with a 3-voice setup at a relatively moderate tempo. Either way, I don't believe it would make that much of a difference, and given my situation the only way to please the theorists who wrote those textbooks would be to scrap the harpsichord part entirely, which, even if viable, I would rather keep in the score just for the sake of its unmistakeably Baroque aura and timbre.

Thank you very much for your input. 🙂