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Stating a melody backwards — from the last note to the first.
Retrograde is more common in 20th-century music (especially serialism) than in tonal music, because reversed melodies often lose their character. However, Bach uses retrograde in canons, and combining retrograde with inversion (retrograde inversion) produces a fourth form of any theme.
Bach's "The Musical Offering" — the Crab Canon plays the same music forward and backward simultaneously.
Retrograde is one of 1760 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
Browse the full dictionary →