Canon in D

Before we get to today's post, a slight vindication for me, and the purpose of this blog: I was watching television last night, and there was a new commercial for that toilet cleaner with Scrubbing Bubbles. Y'know what the music behind it was? That's right. Also Sprach Zarathustra. So now poor old Strauss has to deal with toilet bowls, too.

But yes. Back to today's piece. This composer had the distinct bad luck of following Bach's trajectory from relative anonymity to surprise success, except he predated Bach by 30 years (and is, in fact, the earliest composer featured on Where'd I Hear That thus far! It's the little things, really) and no one cares about any of his other works. However, the one piece he is remembered for has the somewhat dubious honor of, in some ways, representing Baroque music as a whole. That's right, folks - Pachelbel's Canon in D.

If you look quickly, he looks eerily like Helena Bonham Carter.

Johann Pachelbel was born in 1653 in Nuremberg, Germany, to a man named Johann and a woman named Anna. I am starting to think that until the first half of the eighteenth century, there was some sort of law forbidding Germans to have any other names. He spent his life learning, as most children do, but it seems as though his continued musical (and scholarly) training was based on having a reputation as an extraordinary musician and student - there is at least one story of him being admitted to a school on scholarship that was already over-capacity due to this reputation. He finished his studies at the Gymnasium Poeticum (a quaint aspect of the German language is that 'gymnasium' is their word for 'high school' - somewhat odd due to its Greek root of gymnos, meaning 'naked,' which is of course where the word gymnasium came from, being the place in which the Ancient Greeks practiced feats of athleticism entirely in the buff. But I digress), and by 1673 he was living and working entirely in Vienna.

In 1677, Pachelbel moved to Eisenach. And who would he befriend in Eisenach than one Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of our man Sebastian. He stayed in the town for only a year, but when he moved to Erfurt he stayed quite close to the Bachs - among other things, he was the godfather to one of Ambrosius' daughters, taught his oldest children music, and rented a house owned by one of Ambrosius' brothers. He stayed in Erfurt for a dozen years, and had a contract involving composition of church service organ preludes and large-scale early works. He married in 1681, but his wife and only child died from plague in 1683. His second marriage, in 1684, produced seven children, and one of them - Charles Theodore (moving away from Johann at last!) - moved to the American colonies in the 1730s. Charles lived in Boston, Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina, and gave several concerts in New York City and was a rather well-known composer of church music in America. While he was raising his children, Johann Pachelbel turned down posts in Stuttgart and Oxford University to accept a position in Nuremberg, where he lived until his death in 1706. In life, he was never hugely well-known, though his influence can be seen through Charles' American church music as well as J.S. Bach's early organ music (due to one of his first teachers being one of his brothers - and Pachelbel's students).

Ha. Ha.

Before getting into the Canon itself, I feel rather obligated to spell out what a lowercase-c canon is. Partially because, well, what else are we here for, and partially because the canon was one of the biggest musical party tricks (as it were) for hundreds of years. It is a type of music in which a melody is played, followed shortly after by one or more 'imitations.' These imitations can be either total (as in rounds like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Frere Jacques, or the old chestnut Sumer Is Icumen In) or at an interval above or below the melody. Going back to Bach, his Goldberg Variations contain - in a somewhat uncharacteristic bout of showing off - nine canons, each one having a different interval of imitation. Pachelbel's Canon exhibits this (I mean, how could it not?), but it also features a ground bass. A ground bass is simply a pattern of notes in a bass part meant to be repeated forever (think "Heart and Soul"). The Canon itself is a bit of an anomaly in Pachelbel's works - though he was somewhat well-known for his chamber music (which is exactly what it sounds like; music written for small spaces) during his lifetime, most of his surviving music is of the keyboard variety. Furthermore, his surviving chamber music is gathered into larger suites. The Canon was paired with a gigue (essentially a jig with a French accent), but that was all. On top of that, no one has any idea why the Canon was written, or for what occasion.

As tends to happen, Pachelbel's Canon was entirely ignored, then forgotten, for over two hundred years. It was analyzed in a musciological paper in the 1910s, but stayed in the circles of the truly nerdy (said as a compliment, of course) until 1970, when Jean-François Paillard recorded it in 1970, and more so in 1980, when it was featured in the film Ordinary People. Since then, it has been a staple in the public concept of what Classical Music is - but perhaps its more insidious legacy was that of providing the chord progression to thousands of popular songs since the 1970s. Just ask this angry man with an acoustic guitar (the actual examples start roughly 2 minutes in).

Further listening:

Interested in the bizarre and awesome stuff one can do with the canon form? Try Bach's "Musical Offering," in which he writes a canon that modulates up a step every time there is a repetition (and can go on as long as the player wishes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsgdZFIdmeo&feature=related

Because I feel bad for the guy, here's the other half of his Canon and Gigue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv_s4Q6wRKo&feature=related

Wanna hear what a German composer with enough melodrama to kill lesser men (again, said out of love) can do to a well-known and beloved children's round? Try the third movement of Gustav Mahler's "Titan" Symphony no. 1, performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVsLCzSK7Rs