Canon In D Partitura

[Giorgina Makara]

JohannPachelbel's most famous piece, the Canon in D was written around 1680, during the Baroque period, as a piece of chamber music for three violins and basso continuo, but has since been arranged for a wide variety of ensembles.The piece, whose score was discovered and first published in the 1920s, and first recorded in 1940 by Arthur Fiedler, is particularly well known for its chord progression, and is played at weddings and included on classical music compilation CDs. It became very popular in the late 1970s through a famous recording by the Jean-Franois Paillard chamber orchestra.

The actual canon is played by three voices over the ground bass. In the beginning, the flute plays the first two bars of the canon's melody. At this point, the second voice enters with the beginning of the melody, whilst the flute continues with the next two bars of the canon. Then the third voice commences the canon, whilst the second voice plays the third and fourth bars and the flute continues with the fifth and sixth. The three voices then follow one another at two bars' distance until the end of the piece. The canon becomes increasingly dense towards the middle of the piece as the note values become shorter; afterwards, the piece gradually returns to a less complex structure as the note values lengthen once more. There are 28 repetitions of the ground bass in total.

In our arrangement we adapted the first voice to the range of the flute, leaving the second and the third voice with the original melody. If you want, the piece can be played as a flute duet or trio: all you need to do is to play multiple instances of the flute part at two bars' distance.

A musical score has basically two dimensions: pitch and time. In a one-voice musical text, for example, the pitch (corresponds to frequency) of a note is represented vertically, and performance time runs from left to right.

In this line from the Kyrie eleison in a 14th-15th century chantbook, time runs from left to right and pitch corresponds to height. Many details of musical notation have changed since those times, but the basic principles are exactly the same. This image, and the image of the full text, are used by permission of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries, Dr. Kenneth J. LaBudde Department of Special Collections.

So topologically a one-voice musical score is a 2-dimensional strip. The horizontal (time) coordinate runs from start to finish; the vertical coordinate runs from lower pitches to higher pitches. In the chantbook score above, the clef at the start indicates that the second line in the staff corresponds to "fa" on the musical scale.

When a score has symmetry, the topology becomes more interesting. Suppose the score repeats: plays the same sequence of notes over and over. This happens, for example, with a vamp, a sequence of notes or chords played repeatedly as an accompaniment or just to fill time while waiting for something to start. In music notation, the repeat bars identify the end of the sequence with the beginning. This identification makes the score, topologically, into a cylinder.

A (2-part) canon is a score in which a second voice imitates the first voice after a delay. One of the best known is Frre Jacques. The tune is 8 measures long. In measure 3 a second voice starts repeating what the first voice sang. The two voices fit together musically (they "harmonize"); the harmony continues through measures 9 and 10, where the first voice starts over as the second voice is finishing. Then the second voice comes in again, and the sequence from bar 3 through 10 forms a steady state that naturally repeats over and over.

Canons were a speciality of the great Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). In fact the best picture we have of him shows him holding the score of a canon, the thirteenth from the set of 14 he entitled "Fourteen Canons on the first eight fundamental notes of the aria [from the Goldberg Variations]".

In the 1746 portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, Bach is holding a copy of Canon 13 from his set of 14 canons on the first eight notes of the Goldberg Variations ground, BWV 1087. Image in public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This set of canons has its own story. Except for two of them, the one in the painting and another that Bach had written in a friend's autograph book, its existence was unknown until 1974. That's when it was discovered, written in the back of what turned out to be Bach's own copy of the Goldberg Variations. We will be analyzing two others from the set, Canons 3 and 5.

Canons 3, 4 and 5 all involve a voice and its inversion, where all the intervals are reversed, moving down when the original moves up, and vice-versa (Bach describes them as motu recto et contrario). In Canon 3, the leading voice plays the first eight notes of the Goldberg ground, while the follower, starting in measure 3, plays the same melody upside-down.

Top: the first eight notes of the theme of the Goldberg Variations. Center: the same score, reflected up; the axis of symmetry is between B and middle C. Bottom, the two voices together. The first voice starts over while the second is only half done, so the steady state of the canon naturally repeats.

Topologically, both Frre Jacques and BWV 1087, Canon 3 have the same structure: after the introductory measures, the canon settles into a cylindrical steady state. All of Bach's canons are organized this way.

Canon 5 is described by Bach as duplex, a 4: there are 4 voices singing two canons in parallel. One of the canons uses the two voices from Canon 3, except that the follower is moved down an octave; superimposed on it is another canon with the same construction: the follower imitates the leader after two measures, upside down.

Let us focus on the top two voices, in the steady state, and compare the score with its mirror image (flipped down). The last two measures of the score can be seen to be identical to the first two measures upside down (orange boxes in the image), and vice-versa. The score has glide-reflection symmetry.

Note that the score of a canon in contrary motion does not necessarily have glide-reflection symmetry. If a glide-reflection symmetry is repeated, it leads back to the original state. A canon in contrary motion only has this property if the second voice comes exactly at the halfway point.

Our Canons 3 and 5 from BWV 1087 have this property: their steady states can be read from Mbius strips. Other Bach contrary-motion canons, for example Canons 3 and 9 from the Musical Offering, do not have this property, nor do Variations 12 and 15 from the Goldberg set. This corrects an erroneous statement in our Musical Times article, where we stated that they did.

A beautiful video has been posted on YouTube showing that Bach's "Crab Canon" (Canon 1 from the Musical Offering) can be read from a Mbius strip. In the Crab Canon, the follower plays the leader backwards, from finish to start. This is an amazing piece of music, but it really has nothing to do with a Mbius strip. The flaw in the construction is that the score ends up written on both sides of a Mbius strip, so it is really written on the connected double cover of the Mbius strip, i.e. a cylinder. Any repeating text can be so represented.

AMS, American Mathematical Society, the tri-colored AMS logo, and Advancing research, Creating connections, are trademarks and services marks of the American Mathematical Society and registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

This is what creates the canon aspect of the piece: when the same melody is repeated shortly after it is played by another instrument while remaining layered on top of each other. If done right, as in Canon in D, this sounds absolutely stunning!

We could simply learn all of these melodies note for note on the piano and then try to limit ourselves to creating that feeling and texture in the same exact way as Pachelbel. However instead, you can create the same idea and feeling in a much more easy and unique way by selecting a few favorite melodies and using musical techniques and patterns to create new layers, texture, and development as you go.

That formula is especially useful on a solo instrument such as the piano, where it may be difficult to continue a true canon through each new melody. As a piano performer at weddings, sometimes this is required since I often have no idea how long it will take exactly for the wedding party to walk down the aisle. It usually requires improvising to make it work just right.

You will probably notice that as the note values get faster and faster, the energy also increases. Since each of these melodies seems to contain one primary note value, we can think of it as a pulse. The first contains a half note pulse, the second a quarter note pulse, and the third a 16th note pulse. As the pulse speed increases, so does the energy.

There are many ways to add embellishments to a melody. One of the easiest and most common is to simply add harmony! To do that you can simply add more notes of the current chord underneath the melody in some way.

To do this, you can repeat the chord progression as many times as you like using each melody as you please. However, on each repeat think of simple ways you can change and develop the music. Think of ways you can take the energy level up or down.

I encourage you to play through each example and really get a sense of it internally. Afterward, try to make it your own by mixing and matching different patterns, altering them, or even adding new ones in the right or left hand.

If you want a much deeper dive into Canon in D and learn many more beautiful possibilities for both the right and left hand to take your playing to a new level, as well as accompaniment and improvisational techniques for Canon in D, then check out our full course Pachelbel Canon in D (Beginner/Intermediate, Intermediate/Advanced).

Courses are comprised of lessons and are based on selected styles of music and learning focus topics. PWJ offers regular courses, workshops which include teacher interaction, and challenges which are divided into a 4 week learning format.

3a8082e126