[3] Muhly described his prolific use of canons—from which the piece is titled—in the score program notes, writing:There are canons "imitative repetitions" in almost every bar of the Mass.
The most intense use comes towards the beginning the Sanctus, in which each singer repeats a given figure in his own time, creating a flurry of sound to fill the space in St. Thomas's sanctuary.
Allan Kozinn of The New York Times opined, "Driven, joyful motifs, couched in a harmonic language that oscillates between light dissonance and a firmly traditional, Renaissance-like openness, propel the Kyrie, parts of the Gloria and the Sanctus.
"[4] Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times called the piece "interesting" and said it "has the quality of a Steve Reich mix of old English choral music — clever, bright, show-offy.
As he freely acknowledges in his notes, his time as a chorister influenced him profoundly, and he is happy to absorb and reprocess bits of the sound world of Tudor music and Howells within his own vocabulary, characteristic of which is a saturatedly rich harmonic writing and, frequently, minimalist figuration.