Canon (music)
[1] The earliest known non-religious canons are English rounds,[citation needed] a form first given the name rondellus by Walter Odington at the beginning of the 14th century;[2] the best known is "Sumer is icumen in" (composed around 1250), called a rota ("wheel") in the manuscript source.
[7] Richard Taruskin describes "Se je chant mains" as evoking the atmosphere of a falcon hunt: "The middle section is truly a tour de force, but of a wholly new and off-beat type: a riot of hockets set to 'words' mixing French, bird-language, and hound-language in an onomatopoetical mélange.
The final variation of Handel's keyboard Chaconne in G major (HWV 442) is 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: An example of a classical strict canon is the Minuet of Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor, Op.
Here is the superbly logical fulfilment of the two-part octave doubling of Haydn's earliest divertimento minuets":[13] Beethoven's works feature a number of passages in canon.
[14] More sophisticated and varied in its treatment of intervals and harmonic implications is the canonic passage from the second movement of his Piano Sonata 28 in A major, Op.
Here, four of the characters sing a quartet in canon, "a sublime musical wonder",[15] accompanied by orchestration of the utmost delicacy and refinement.
[19] "The softly padding gait, the dove-tailed perfection of the counterpoint, induce a trance that, carrying the protagonists outside Time, hints that there are realms of truth beyond the masks they pathetically or comically present to the world.
"[15] In the Romantic era, the use of devices such as canon was even more often subtly hidden, as for example in Schumann's piano piece "Vogel als Prophet" (1851).
[21] In the following passage, the left hand shadows the right at the time distance of one beat and at the pitch interval of an octave lower: Michael Musgrave writes that as a result of the strict canon at the octave, the piece is "of an anxious, suppressed nature, ... in the central section this tension is temporarily eased through a very contained passage which employs the canon in chordal terms between the hands.
"[22] According to Denis Matthews, "[what] looks on paper like another purely intellectual exercise... in practice it produces a warmly melodic effect.
In the 20th century, Conlon Nancarrow composed complex tempo or mensural canons, mostly for the player piano as they are extremely difficult to play.
Arvo Pärt has written several mensuration canons, including Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Arbos and Festina Lente.
A duet aria, "Herr, du siehst statt guter Werke" from J. S. Bach's Cantata BWV 9, Es ist das Heil uns kommen her features a double canon "between flute and oboe on the one hand and the soprano and alto voices on the other.
But what is most interesting in this movement is that the very attractive melodic surface of the canon belies its dogmatic message by offering a moving simplicity of tone to indicate the comfort that particular doctrine provides for the believer.
They are not very common, though examples of mirror canons can be found in the works of Bach, Mozart (e.g., the trio from Serenade for Wind Octet in C minor, K. 388/384a), Anton Webern, and other composers.
[30] Olivier Messiaen employed a technique which he called "rhythmic canon", a polyphony of independent strands in which the pitch material differs.
[31] Peter Maxwell Davies was another post-tonal composer who favoured rhythmic canons, where the pitch materials are not obliged to correspond.
[32] The notion of rhythmic canon transfers Messiaen's idea of mode of limited transposition from the domain of pitch to the domain of time:[33] Messiaen considered a set of disjoint pitch classes with the same interval content which covers the twelve-tone tempered scale.
In that sense, a rhythmic canon tiles time, covering a regular pulse train by disjoint equal rhythms from different voices.
[44] "The enigmatical character of a [puzzle] canon does not consist of any special way of composing it, but only of the method of writing it down, of which a solution is required.
[46] Other notable contributors to the genre include Ciconia, Ockeghem, Byrd, Beethoven, Brumel, Busnois, Haydn, Josquin des Prez, Mendelssohn, Pierre de la Rue, Brahms, Schoenberg, Nono and Maxwell Davies.
[62] Thomas Morley complained that sometimes a solution, "which being founde (it might bee) was scant worth the hearing",[63] J. G. Albrechtsberger admits that, "when we have traced the secret, we have gained but little; as the proverb says, 'Parturiunt montes, etc.'"
Since its recognition online, there have been multiple covers of the song, including a mashup of it with Johann Pachelbel's Canon and Gigue in D Major.
[65] In his early work, such as Piano Phase (1967) and Clapping Music (1972), Steve Reich used a process he calls phasing which is a "continually adjusting" canon with variable distance between the voices, in which melodic and harmonic elements are not important, but rely simply on the time intervals of imitation.
