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Composers
Bach
des Préz
Haydn
Mozart
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Canon
A piece including precise imitation,
in which an identical tune is played by several voices in time spacing
and in fixed intervals. The term "canon"
is Greek for "rule" or "model", and it means the original
model repeats in the voices pursuing the first voice. In the past, they
were even named - "Dux"
for the first, and "comes"
(answering) for the other voices. Some perpetual canons never end
(a form known as 'rota'
or 'round'
- Rondeau),
and with every voice's conclusion it begins again (infinite canon).
As a polyphonic
form, the canon is considered simpler than
the fugue,
but it is more complex and technical in creating the coordination between
the voices. It is one of the most ancient forms of polyphony .
The oldest known secular canon (or "round") "Summer
is Coming"
("Sumer is icumen in")
- an infinite canon for 4 voices,
was written in England
around the year 1240. By
the end of the middle ages
and the beginning of the Renaissance,
the craft of writing canons was sophisticated and rational, and composers
set different rules and limitations for themselves, as a creative challenge.
The retrograde canon, in
which the second voice is identical to the first one, only sung backwards,
were common (the canon "My End is My
Beginning" ("Ma
fin est mon commencement") by Guillaume
de Machaut
is the most famous one), and so were the "inverted canons",
in which the second voice is identical to the inversion of every interval
of the first voice's melody (it moves by the same melodic intervals, but
in the opposite direction).
Among the well-known canon composers
of the "Netherlands School"
were Guillaume Dufay,
Johannes Ockeghem
and one of the geniuses of the his time - Josquin
des Préz.
In a later period, Mozart
and Haydn
also took pleasure in canons, although canons
lost their centrality as an independent genre.
Study more in a
web site
"Nightingale canon" by Mozart
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French folk canon
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Haydn's canon
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