Pachelbel's Canon

Hans-Joachim Schulze, writing in 1985, suggested that the piece may have been composed for Johann Christoph Bach's wedding, on 23 October 1694, which Pachelbel attended.

Another scholar, Charles E. Brewer, investigated a variety of possible connections between Pachelbel's and Heinrich Biber's published chamber music.

[9] The canon (without the accompanying gigue) was first published in 1919 by scholar Gustav Beckmann, who included the score in his article on Pachelbel's chamber music.

[10] His research was inspired and supported by early music scholar and editor Max Seiffert, who in 1929 published his arrangement of the "Canon and Gigue" in his Organum series.

[12] The canon was first recorded in Berlin in 1938 by Hermann Diener and His Music College, under the title, 'Dreistimmiger Kanon mit Generalbass'.

[2] This rendition was done in a more Romantic style, at a significantly slower tempo than it had been played at before, and contained obbligato parts, written by Paillard.

Paillard's interpretation of the canon was also included on a widely distributed album by the mail-order label Musical Heritage Society in 1968.

In July 1968, Greek band Aphrodite's Child released the single "Rain and Tears", which was a baroque-rock adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon.

In 1970, a classical radio station in San Francisco played the Paillard recording and became inundated by listener requests.

[20] The canon was selected for the soundtrack of Carl Sagan's popular 1980 American PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and the astronomer cited this work as one of his Desert Island Discs on the BBC on 18 July 1981.

[22][23] In 1982, pianist George Winston included his "Variations on the Kanon by Johann Pachelbel" on his solo piano album December, which has sold over three million copies.

[25] In Germany, Italy and France of the 17th century, some pieces built on an ostinato bass were called chaconnes or passacaglias; such works sometimes incorporate some form of variation in the upper voices.

[9] The Pet Shop Boys' 1993 cover of "Go West" played up that song's resemblance to both Pachelbel's Canon and the Soviet Anthem.

Other songs that make use of the Pachelbel's Canon chord progression include "Streets of London" by Ralph McTell (1974), "Gemilang" by Krakatau (1986), "Basket Case" by Green Day (1994), and "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis (1996) (though with a variation at the end), while Maroon 5 used the harmonic sequence of Pachelbel's Canon (and part of the melody) for their 2019 single "Memories".

[30] In 2012, the UK-based Co-Operative Funeralcare compiled a list of the most popular, classical, contemporary and religious music across 30,000 funerals.