Round (music)

Other well-known examples are "Frère Jacques", "Three Blind Mice", "Kookaburra", and, more recently, the outro of "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys.

Rounds that fall into the category of "perpetual canon" feature a melody whose end leads back to the beginning, allowing easy and immediate repetition.

However, the earliest known rounds are two works with Latin texts found in the eleventh fascicle of the Notre Dame manuscript Pluteo 29.1.

Classical composers who turned their hand to the round format include Thomas Arne, John Blow, William Byrd, Henry Purcell, Moondog (Louis Hardin), Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Benjamin Britten (for example, "Old Joe Has Gone Fishing", sung by the villagers in the pub to keep the peace, at the end of act 1 of Peter Grimes) .

[13] Several rounds are included amongst Arnold Schoenberg's thirty-plus canons, which "within their natural limitations ... are brilliant pieces, containing too much of the composer's characteristically unexpected blend of seriousness, humour, vigour and tenderness to remain unperformed".