The best 5 minutes of your day. Listen to Johann Pachelbel’s exquisite Canon in D major
Pachelbel’s Canon is perhaps one of the most iconic pieces of music ever written, and in this historically accurate performance by the Voices of Music ensemble, the beauty of the original takes centre stage.
Lost… and found
The Canon is today instantly recognisable; but, quite unbelievably, it all but disappeared from our musical history for over 200 years.
Unfortunately, there is conceivably an entire world of magnificent music that has been lost to time.
Fortuitously for us living in the 21st century, though, a manuscript of the piece dating from the 1800s survived and caught the attention of musicologists in the early 1900s.
With a remarkable resurgence of interest in the Baroque period in the mid-20th century, the Canon was catapulted into the spotlight due to a 1968 recording by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra.
The public at large fell in love with it immediately.
Watch – The Voices of Music perform one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written
Historical context
Historians don’t have a reliable date for its composition, nor an understanding of the context in which it was composed; the date range of anywhere between 1680 to Johann Pachelbel’s death in 1706, however, is a standard estimate.
The Bach connection
There has been speculation that it was composed for Johann Christoph Bach’s wedding in 1694.
Pachelbel had befriended Johann Christoph’s father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, several years earlier, and was named godfather to Ambrosius’s daughter, Johanna Juditha.
Moreover, he served as a musical tutor to Johann Christoph.
If our composer attended his previous pupil’s wedding in 1694, he would have met Johann Christoph’s youngest brother – a nine year old Johann Sebastian Bach, one of western art music’s most prolific geniuses.
Hey, it’s a small world.
Some of the technical stuff – in plain English
1. The chamber ensemble
The Canon in D major was a piece of chamber music written for a chamber ensemble including three violins and a basso continuo group.
To recap:
- A chamber ensemble consists of a selection of just a few instruments that could easily fit into a small hall or large room. A typical orchestra, by contrast, is very much larger and needs a concert hall/venue.
- Chamber music is written with the small ensemble in mind, and is more “intimate” than music written for symphonic orchestras.
- In the Canon in D major, the basso continuo group forms part of this chamber ensemble: these instruments play the bassline of the piece and provide it with chords “under” the violin melody.
The three violins carry the melodic voices of the piece, and the basso continuo group lays down the harmonic structure.
In this performance, the basso continuo group consists of a cello, a Baroque organ (the small keyboard) and a theorbo on the far right of the stage (the lute like instrument).
2. The Canon form
The Canon form is, essentially, a musical structure in which the melody is begun by instruments one after another.
The below notation describes it perfectly (don’t worry, you don’t have to be able to read music to see what I’m getting at).
The top violin starts the melody (marked in light blue), and after the first two bars, the second violin starts to play the exact same melody (also marked in light blue).
The third violin then starts the same melody after the second violin (yep, it’s marked in light blue, too). And so on…
The melody for each violin is exactly the same, but they begin one after the other.
3. The Chaconne
What makes this Canon untraditional is that, as it progresses, variations of the original melody are played. Melodic variations are typical of another musical form: the chaconne.
4. Period instrumentation
The performers in the selected video are using period instruments in a chamber ensemble setup that would have almost certainly been used in Pachelbel’s day.
Voices of Music, regarding the violins and cello, point out that,
…the string instruments are not only Baroque, but they are in Baroque setup: this means that the strings, fingerboard, bridge and other parts of the violin appear just as they did in Pachelbel’s time. No metal hardware such as chinrests, clamps or fine tuners are used on the violins, allowing the violins to vibrate freely.
And referring to the Baroque organ:
The organ used is made entirely of wood, based on German Baroque instruments, and the pipes are voiced to provide a smooth accompaniment to the strings, instead of a more soloistic sound.
With all this said, let’s remember that the technical aspects are, at the end of the day, not as important as the actual music – as we experience it.
It was written with the creation of beauty in mind, and it is a breathtaking beauty that we hear in it.
