Canon (music)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Canon, one of music's oldest compositional techniques, works on a deceptively simple idea: play a melody, then have a second voice play the same melody a moment later. What emerges from that delay is something no single voice could achieve alone. The technique spans at least eight centuries of written music, from an anonymous English song composed around 1250 to a Queen rock song recorded in 1975. How did a device that sounds like a rule become one of music's most expressive tools? And what does it mean that the word "canon" itself comes from the Greek for "law"?

• 2. A Law Made Sound

  ›

  The word canon derives from the Greek "κανών", Latinised as canon, meaning "law" or "norm". In music, that law described the rule explaining how additional parts could be derived from a single written melodic line. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this kind of strict imitation had no distinct name of its own. It was lumped together with all imitative counterpoint under the label fugue, with strict canonic imitation specifically called fuga ligata, meaning "fettered fugue". Only in the 16th century did the word "canon" take on its modern musical meaning. Before that, the rule was usually given verbally by the composer, or sometimes indicated through special signs in the score, signs that were themselves occasionally called canoni. The initial melody in a canon is called the leader, or dux in Latin. The imitating voice is called the follower, or comes. When every voice is musically identical and the piece loops back on itself endlessly, the result is what most listeners know as a round. "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Frère Jacques" are rounds, each built on the same mechanic that powered the most elaborate contrapuntal writing of the Renaissance.

• 3. Hunting Songs and Hidden Rules

  ›

  The earliest known non-religious canons are English rounds. Walter Odington gave this form the name rondellus at the beginning of the 14th century. The best-known example is "Sumer is icumen in", composed around 1250 and called a rota, meaning "wheel", in its manuscript source. Canons spread quickly across Europe's musical cultures. In France and Italy, the form was drawn especially to hunting songs. The medieval Italian word for hunting is "caccia"; the medieval French equivalent is "chace". Richard Taruskin describes the anonymous French chace "Se je chant mains" as evoking the atmosphere of a falcon hunt, with a middle section he calls a riot of hockets mixing French, bird-language, and hound-language in what he calls an onomatopoetical mélange. Guillaume de Machaut used the three-voice chace form in movements from his work Le Lai de la Fontaine, composed in 1361. Taruskin says of Machaut's setting of the fourth stanza that a well-wrought chace can be far more than the sum of its parts, and that this particular chace is possibly Machaut's greatest feat of subtilitas. Jacob de Senleches contributed a late 14th-century example as well. His La harpe de melodie, according to Richard Hoppin, features two canonic voices over a free and textless tenor, placing it within the rhythmically complex tradition of the late 14th-century ars subtilior school.

• 4. Bach, Handel, and the Baroque Peak

  ›

  J. S. Bach and Handel both featured canons extensively in their works. Handel's keyboard Chaconne in G major, catalogued as HWV 442, closes its final variation with a canon in which the player's right hand is imitated at the distance of one beat, creating rhythmic ambiguity within the prevailing triple time. Bach's engagement with the form ran deeper still. His Goldberg Variations contains nine canons of increasing interval size, ranging from unison to ninth. Each of those canons also follows the overall harmonic sequence common to all variations in the work. In the cantata BWV 9, Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, a duet aria called "Herr, du siehst statt guter Werke" features a double canon between flute and oboe on one hand and soprano and alto voices on the other. What makes that movement striking is that its attractive melodic surface conceals its dogmatic message. Canonic devices in Bach's work often carry the association of strictness and the law. Bach also composed in the puzzle canon form, presenting many of his canons in The Musical Offering so that only one voice was notated, leaving performers to work out the remaining parts from cryptic clues.

• 5. Fidelio's Frozen Moment

  ›

  Beethoven's most dramatically effective use of canon occurs in the first act of his opera Fidelio, where four characters sing a quartet together. Antony Hopkins describes the effect in unambiguous terms: four participants, each delivering their quatrain, all singing the same music to very different words. Hopkins writes that the rigid form allows for character differentiation and makes a dramatic point. What makes the quartet remarkable is not just its formal ingenuity but its emotional quality. Hopkins describes the softly padding gait and dove-tailed perfection of the counterpoint as inducing a trance that carries the protagonists outside time. Elsewhere in Beethoven's output, canon appears in more modest forms. His Symphony No. 4 contains what Hopkins calls a delightfully naive canon. His Piano Sonata 28 in A major, Op. 101, offers something more elaborate in its second movement, with canonic writing varied in its treatment of intervals and harmonic implications. Schumann's piano piece "Vogel als Prophet", written in 1851, shows what the Romantic era did with the technique. Nicholas Cook writes that in that piece the canon is absorbed into the texture of the music: it is there, but one does not easily hear it.

• 6. Varieties of Imitation

  ›

  Canon encompasses far more than simple repetition at a delay. In an inversion canon, also called an al rovescio canon, the follower moves in contrary motion to the leader: where the leader descends by a particular interval, the follower rises by that same interval. A retrograde canon, known in Latin as canon cancrizans or crab canon, has the follower accompany the leader backward. A table canon takes this further: designed to be placed on a table between two musicians, each reading the same line of music in opposite directions. Bach wrote a few table canons. A mensuration canon, also called a prolation or proportional canon, has the follower imitate the leader at a different rhythmic speed. The follower may double the rhythmic values (augmentation) or cut them in half (diminution). Johannes Ockeghem wrote an entire mass, the Missa prolationum, in which each section is a mensuration canon, all at different speeds and entry intervals. In the 20th century, Conlon Nancarrow composed complex tempo canons mostly for player piano because they are, as the source puts it, extremely difficult to play. Arvo Pärt applied mensuration canons in works including Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Arbos, and Festina Lente. Per Nørgård's infinity series has a sloth canon structure, a form described as fractal-like due to its self-similarity.

• 7. Riddles and Rock Songs

  ›

  Puzzle canons, also called riddle canons or enigma canons, present only one written voice and require performers to deduce the remaining parts from clues. The earliest known example appears to be an anonymous ballade, "En la maison Dedalus", found at the end of a set of theory treatises in the Berkeley Manuscript, from the third quarter of the 14th century. Mozart solved the puzzles of Father Martini and then composed his own riddles, K. 73r, using Latin epigrams including Sit trium series una and Ter ternis canite vocibus. Thomas Morley complained that solving a puzzle canon sometimes yielded a result scant worth the hearing. J. G. Albrechtsberger acknowledged the same frustration but argued that speculative passages serve to sharpen acumen. The form's reach extended well into popular music. The Prophet's Song, recorded by the British rock band Queen in 1975, features a prominent vocal canon bridge sung by Freddie Mercury. It runs from the 3:25 mark to the 4:49 mark, where it transitions into vocal harmony. The canon was produced using early tape delay devices and has been cited as one of Queen's finest studio achievements. Steve Reich, in his early works Piano Phase from 1967 and Clapping Music from 1972, used a process he called phasing, which applies a continually adjusting canon with variable distance between voices, stripping away melodic and harmonic concerns to focus purely on the time intervals of imitation.