Tenet is an amazing film. If you have seen it you may have been one of those people sitting
in the theater thinking "I have absolutely no clue what's going on", but regardless you must
admit it's a brilliant piece of cinematography; a work of art, if you will. If you haven't seen
it I'd definitely recommend going to check it out. I have seen it and was thinking afterwards "what
would Tenet be like if it was a piece of music?". If you already know where I'm going with this
I've included timecodes in the description so you can skip ahead to the music. Otherwise,
here's a short explanation. Tenet deals with the concept of time inversion, or reverse entropy,
both going forwards in time and traveling backwards through time. Not time travel,
but instead time proceeding as normal with someone or something traveling backwards through time
within that environment. From the perspective of that someone or something they are actually
moving forwards in time with everything around them appearing to be in reverse, but coexisting
within the same reality. Kind of like hitting the reverse-play button on certain objects or people.
As an example: here's a short clip from the film where you can see two people pushing
a person on a stretcher going forwards in time while everything else around them is
in reverse. So what I really wanted to do was create a piece of music that could be played
on its own and make sense, but could also be played at the same time with itself in reverse,
and still sound like a complete piece of music. This meant composing the piece and then reversing
it so that the end became the beginning and the beginning became the end, and then playing both
versions together. Just to give you an example on how the music reverse entropy was done:
here are a few bars from the music. The easiest thing to do is to simply flip the image;
and if we look at this bar you can see that the top staff has a minim followed by a crotchet.
Over in the flipped image the same bar starts with a crotchet followed by a minim. So in essence,
where a note would stop being played it now starts being played, and vice versa. We can clean up this
flipped image by rewriting the notes. Feel free to pause the video so you can see how each bar
was reversed. I decided to write this music in 3/4 so that there's a center pulse in each bar,
and I also kept the harmony and chordal progressions on the more simple side.
Having said all that, let's get into the music. First I'll play the forward version on its own,
and then follow that with both versions, forward and reversed, played at the same time.
Just like in the movie: red will indicate the forward version and blue the reversed.
The sheet music will be available on my website; link is in the description.
And hitting the thumbs up button lets YouTube know that you enjoyed the video. You might as well do
it now before you listen to the music since we're talking about time inversion. And ... enjoy!