Canon (music)
In music, a canon is a contrapuntal compositional technique that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration. The initial melody is called the leader, while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower. The follower must imitate the leader, either as an exact replication of its rhythms and intervals or some transformation thereof. Repeating canons in which all voices are musically identical are called rounds—familiar singalong versions of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Frère Jacques" that call for each successive group of voices to begin the same song a bar or two after the previous group began are popular examples.
An accompanied canon is a canon accompanied by one or more additional independent parts that do not imitate the melody.
History
Medieval and Renaissance
During the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque—that is, through the early 18th century—any kind of imitative musical counterpoints were called fugues, with the strict imitation now known as canon qualified as fuga ligata, meaning "fettered fugue". Only in the 16th century did the word "canon" begin to be used to describe the strict, imitative texture created by such a procedure. The word is derived from the Greek "κανών", Latinised as canon, which means "law" or "norm". In contrapuntal usage, the word refers to the "rule" explaining the number of parts, places of entry, transposition, and so on, according to which one or more additional parts may be derived from a single written melodic line. This rule was usually given verbally, but could also be supplemented by special signs in the score, sometimes themselves called canoni. The earliest known non-religious canons are English rounds, a form first given the name rondellus by Walter Odington at the beginning of the 14th century; the best known is "Sumer is icumen in", called a rota in the manuscript source. The term "round" was first used in English sources in the 16th century.Canons featured in the music of the Italian Trecento and the 14th-century ars nova in France. An Italian example is "Tosto che l'alba" by Gherardello da Firenze. In both France and Italy, canons were often featured in hunting songs. The medieval and modern Italian word for hunting is "caccia", while the medieval French word is spelled "chace". A well-known French chace is the anonymous "Se je chant mains". 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." Guillaume de Machaut also used the 3-voice "chace" form in movements from his masterpiece Le Lai de la Fontaine. Referring to the setting of the fourth stanza of this work, Taruskin says "a well-wrought chace can be far more than the sum of its parts; and this particular chace is possibly Machaut's greatest feat of subtilitas."
An example of late 14th century canon which featured some of the rhythmic complexity of the late 14th century ars subtilior school of composers is La harpe de melodie by Jacob de Senleches. According to Richard Hoppin, "This virelai has two canonic voices over a free and textless tenor."
In many pieces in three contrapuntal parts, only two of the voices are in canon, while the remaining voice is a free melodic line. In Dufay's song "Resvelons nous, amoureux", the lower two voices are in canon, but the upper part is what David Fallows describes as a "florid top line":
Baroque
Both J. S. Bach and Handel featured canons in their works. The final variation of Handel's keyboard Chaconne in G major 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:Classical
An example of a classical strict canon is the Minuet of Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2. "Throughout its sinewy length, between upper and lower strings. Here is the superbly logical fulfilment of the two-part octave doubling of Haydn's earliest divertimento minuets":Beethoven
's works feature a number of passages in canon. The following comes from his Symphony No. 4:Antony Hopkins describes the above as "a delightfully naïve canon". 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. 101:
Beethoven's most spectacular and dramatically effective use of canon occurs in the first act of his opera Fidelio. Here, four of the characters sing a quartet in canon, "a sublime musical wonder", accompanied by orchestration of the utmost delicacy and refinement. "Each of the four participants delivers his or her quatrain", "The use of canon to embody the differing perspectives of the participants a first glance seems odd, but the rigid form allows for some character differentiation and does in fact make a dramatic point". "Everyone sings the same music to very different words, sinking their private thoughts into musical or at least linear anonymity". "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."
Romantic era
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".According to Nicholas Cook, "the canon is, as it were, absorbed into the texture of the music—it is there, but one doesn't easily hear it." Peter Latham describes Brahms' Intermezzo in F minor, Op. 118, No. 4 as a piece "rich in canons". 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." According to Denis Matthews, " looks on paper like another purely intellectual exercise... in practice it produces a warmly melodic effect."
20th century to present
Stravinsky composed canons, including a Canon on a Russian Popular Tune and the Double Canon. Conlon Nancarrow composed a number of canons for player piano. Anton Webern employed canonic textures in his work; his Op. 16 work is a collection of five canons for soprano, clarinet, and bass clarinet.Types
Considering the many types of canon "in the tonal repertoire", it may be ironic that "canon—the strictest type of imitation—has such a wide variety of possibilities". The most rigid and ingenious forms of canon are not strictly concerned with pattern but also with content. Canons are classified by various traits including the number of voices, the interval at which each successive voice is transposed in relation to the preceding voice, whether voices are inverse, retrograde, or retrograde-inverse; the temporal distance between each voice, whether the intervals of the second voice are exactly those of the original or if they are adjusted to fit the diatonic scale, and the tempo of successive voices. However, canons may use more than one of the above methods.Contour Canon
A Contour Canon can be recognized in the traditional sense, similar to a strict canon or to a canon by inversion, where an original theme or design is presented, and is then followed by a response of the same theme, as well as in an untraditional fashion, where Subcontouric Cells are positioned in such a way that they assemble a canon. In this untraditional fashion, a contour’s cells are presented and altered in a rotational motion, until the entire image or contour can be seen in its Prime form. Each cell in a pairing of Subcontouric Cells cycles through their rotational variations, until they have established themselves in their intended contour position, or Prime Form, such as, referred to as a contour’s Cell Cycle.
Terminology
Although, for clarity, this article uses leader and follower to denote the leading voice in a canon and those that imitate it, musicological literature also uses the traditional Latin terms dux and comes for "leader" and "follower", respectively.Number of voices
A canon of two voices may be called a canon in two, similarly a canon of x voices would be called a canon in x. This terminology may be used in combination with a similar terminology for the interval between each voice, different from the terminology in the following paragraph.Another standard designation is "Canon: Two in One", which means two voices in one canon. "Canon: Four in Two" means four voices with two simultaneous canons. While "Canon: Six in Three" means six voices with three simultaneous canons, and so on.