(from Gk. kanōn: ‘rule’, ‘precept’).
As a musical term, ‘canon’ originally referred to an inscribed formula or instruction which the performer would implement in order to realize one or more parts from the given notation. Among the many possible instructions provided by a verbal ‘canon’ was that of extracting a second voice from the given voice at a specified intervallic and temporal distance. Strict (‘canonic’) imitation was so common and useful a procedure that the word ‘canon’ eventually came to mean the polyphonic texture of two or more voices created by the procedure, which is its primary meaning today.
ALFRED MANN, J. KENNETH WILSON/PETER URQUHART
The word ‘canon’ began to be used with its modern meaning only in the 16th century, almost three centuries after the first canonic works (in the modern sense) had been written. Use of the term ‘fuga’ to describe this strict imitative texture predates use of the word ‘canon’, and ‘fuga’ remained the more precise and common term for canonic texture well into the 18th century. The history of the Fugue is thus inextricably linked with that of canon, especially during the 16th century in the formulations of Zarlino and Vicentino. A number of other terms for canonic textures were used before the term ‘canon’ became common: the 14th century saw the rise of the terms ‘rondellus’, ‘chace’, ‘caccia’ and ‘caça’, all used to describe what are today called canons.
The term ‘canon’ came into common use in musical sources before it was widely discussed in theoretical treatises. Three different terms occur in the rubric accompanying Du Fay's chanson Entre vous, gentils amoureux: ‘Canon: Iste rondelus de se facit tenorem fugando duo tempora’. ‘Canon’ indicates that the following rule must be applied in order to perform the work; ‘rondelus’ is the form or genre; and ‘fugando’ describes how the voices will relate to one another, the use of this verbal instruction suggesting the improvisatory tradition from which such notated and canonically prescribed imitation emerged.
With the exception of a few remarks in the Berkeley manuscript (US-BE 744), the first significant discussion of the term ‘canon’ was by Tinctoris, who defined it in his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium(1475): ‘A canon is a rule showing the purpose of the composer behind a certain obscurity’. The practice of writing down music in such a way as to require ‘resolution’ received increasing attention from theorists beginning with Ramis de Pareia (Musica practica, 1482), until in the 16th century a chapter devoted to canon was expected in theoretical treatises. Canonic instructions sometimes altered a given line without creating a new voice. Thus, the phrase ‘Canon: Revertere’ directs the singer to perform the part in retrograde motion; ‘De minimis non curat pretor’ directs the singer to sing the tenor leaving out any note smaller than a semibreve. But the most common form of canonic writing was imitative, in which two or more voices of a composition were resolved or drawn from a single given part. Imitative canonic writing settled into discrete categories, following the principles of imitation at different distances (e.g. canon ad minimam, ad semibrevem) and of imitation at different upper or lower intervals (e.g. canon ad epidiapente, in subdiatessaron – canon at the upper 5th, lower 4th etc.). More complex are the ‘mensuration canons’: canon by augmentation, diminution or by proportional changes of note values (see Notation, §III, 3) and canon by inversion or retrograde motion. In the canon by inversion (canon per motu contrario per arsin et thesin) the direction of melodic progression is inverted in successive entrances, but in the canon by retrograde motion (canon cancrizans, canone al rovescio – ‘crab canon’) the canonic imitation is produced by reading the original melodic line backwards, so that the imitating part starts at the end rather than at the beginning of the piece. The combined principles of inversion and retrograde motion (canone al contrario riverso) produce the ‘mirror canon’ in which the canonically imitating voice is obtained through a reading that requires turning the page upside down. The intricate joining of various canonic procedures often went hand in hand with the combination of several canons in one work: different pairs of voices presenting different melodic lines, a procedure referred to in later terminology as ‘group canon’. Customary English designations for particular group canons follow a pattern that can be described as an ‘x-in-y’ formula, meaning that x parts present y melodies: a ‘four-in-two’ canon is a double canon where four parts present two melodies, ‘six-in-two’ indicates that six parts present two melodies, and so on.
The procedure of strict imitation considerably antedates the use of the term ‘canon’, and probably stems from improvised forms of music in oral tradition, just as rounds continue to circulate today without reliance on notation. Canonic principles can be seen in 13th-century works relying on voice-exchange. The Rondellus, first described by Walter Odington (c1300) as a technique for coordinating three polyphonic voices, was a voice-exchange style that may have been described a century earlier as a typically Welsh or English style of singing in the Descriptio Kambriae of Giraldus Cambrensis (Burstyn, 1983). In the 14th century, canonic writing began to flourish in specific genres whose names reflect both poetic content and contrapuntal technique. The Chace, one of the principal forms of the French Ars Nova, was a hunting-song written for two voices that ‘chased’ each other; its Italian counterpart was the Caccia, whose two canonic vocal parts were accompanied by an untexted tenor.
These canonic prototypes of the Ars Nova lived on in the English Catch and Round, and their names also suggest the two basic types later recognized in the categories of ‘concluded’ and ‘perpetual’ canon. The former, stressing the principle of linear pursuit and ‘capture’, is most conspicuously represented by the Latin equivalent for caccia, the term Fuga, which was first used about 1330 by Jacques de Liège and remained the chief designation for canonic compositions until Bach’s time. The latter, representing the principle of circular return, is expressed by the Latin ‘rota’ and its German equivalent ‘Radel’ (‘wheel’, ‘roll’). ‘Rota’ appears in the original manuscript of the famous canon Sumer is icumen in (GB-Lbl Harl.978; see Rota) which, probably antedating all other works of the kind, stands as the classical example of early canonic art. ‘Radel’ appears in a somewhat later manuscript (A-Wn B.4696) of a three-voice canon in honour of St Martin. A culmination of 14th-century canonic technique was reached in the works of Machaut, whose triple ballade Sanz cuer m’en vois is a three-part canon with a different text in each voice, and whose rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement is the earliest known piece based entirely on retrograde procedures, a technique whose roots can be traced as far back as the late 12th century.
The first use of canon at intervals other than the unison occurred at the end of the 14th century. While canons at the octave appeared sporadically as variations of unison canons, canon at the 5th required a completely new orientation, and a subtle control of pitch material. Francesco Landini and Johannes Ciconia were among the first composers to write canons at the 5th. Landini's Dè, dimmi tu bears some resemblance to French models, and shows signs that it caused the composer some difficulty. Ciconia's Quod jactatur, on the other hand, is a puzzle canon that has never been satisfactorily solved; although it appears to call for a three-voice solution, only two voices at a time fit together convincingly. Both the Landini and Ciconia canons at the 5th are exact in their intervallic content, and thus conform to the definition of fuga offered by Tinctoris some 75 years later: ‘Fuga is the identity of the parts of a melody with regard to the value, name, shape, and sometimes even place on the staff, of its notes and rests’. As Parrish pointed out in his edition of Tinctoris's Diffinitorium(1963), ‘name’ (nomen) here means solmization name. Canons at the 5th were first accomplished by the follower voice duplicating the solmization of the leader. In such canonic works by Du Fay, Hugo de Lantins and Guillaume de Faugues, and in many works by Josquin, Willaert and even Byrd, composers expected performers to use the same solmization in the leader and follower voices, for the canons are arranged to be intervallically ‘exact’. On the other hand, beginning with two canonic works by Ockeghem from the mid-15th century, Prenez sur moi and Missa prolationum, another kind of canon was explored, in which identity of solmization was not intended. Ockeghem was also the first composer to write canons at the imperfect intervals of the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th, a development made possible only by dropping the requirement for identical solmization.
Ockeghem's invention of non-identical or ‘diatonic’ canon was immediately seized by the next generation of composers, and quickly became the more important canonic technique. Franco-Flemish composers such as Compère, Josquin, Mouton, Brumel, La Rue, Isaac and Willaert wrote mass movements using canon, works based on four-in-two canons, canons composed of stacked 4ths or 5ths, and large-scale sacred and secular works supported by canonic scaffoldings of two or more parts. In addition to exact canons at perfect intervals, composers explored with increasing frequency ‘diatonic’ canons both at the perfect intervals of the 4th and 5th and at the imperfect intervals of 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th. Among the theorists who reflected on this explosion of interest in canonic procedure a few decades later, Giovanni Spataro (in a lost treatise quoted in a letter of October 1529 to him from Giovanni Del Lago), Aaron (Lucidario, 1545), Vicentino (L'antica musica, 1555) and Zarlino (Le istitutioni harmoniche, 1558) made reference to the new kind of diatonic canon, using a variety of terms: fuga, fugatio, consequentia, imitatio, reditta and, for the first time with this meaning, the word ‘canon’ itself. Vicentino in particular expressed his preference for canon at the imperfect intervals over those at the perfect intervals, which he described as ‘non moderno’. Furthermore, he preferred fugae that would cease their imitation after a few notes; thus the technique of what today is called free imitation was in the 16th century subject to the same terminology and theoretical description as the canon; the term fuga served for both.
Zarlino responded to the variety of terms for canons in his time by both clarifying and revising their usage. He carefully distinguished between the older ‘exact’ canon and the newer ‘diatonic’ canon by using the terms fuga and imitatione respectively. The adjectives legata and sciolta could be attached to both terms to indicate that the canonic imitation either lasted throughout the work or would break off into free writing after a strict beginning (Haar, 1971). Thus legata was used to describe works that we would call canons, whereas sciolta described works that began with fugal imitation. Zarlino relegated the term ‘canon’ to its older meaning of the verbal rule, and criticized the ‘musicians of lower intelligence’ who used the term ‘canon’ loosely to describe what ought to have been called fuga. ‘Canon’ was already beginning to change in meaning, however, and some of Zarlino's distinctions were not fully sustained by the many theorists who studied and followed him over the next 150 years. Nevertheless, Zarlino's definitions are important for an understanding of the evolution of the term ‘canon’. His use of the terms fuga and imitatione does not correspond with the use of ‘fugue’ and ‘imitation’ today, for both could be canonic if legata or freely imitative if sciolta. His term imitatione sciolta fits everything we might describe as fugal or imitative, while the other three combinations, fuga legata, fuga sciolta and imitatione legata, describe distinctions that are rarely imagined today.
The intertwining of canon and fugue in 16th-century usage reflects the continuing fertility of canonic composition. Canon had not yet been separated off into a separate genre, but instead was intimately connected to freer forms of composing. Franco-Flemish canonic art was continued by conservative composers such as Palestrina, whose many canonic movements and complete masses have received little scrutiny. Practical treatises of the 16th century regularly included compendia of canonic devices, not simply as intellectual curiosities but as pure forms of the kind of imitation that could be used in freer styles of composition. Sebald Heyden’s De arte canendi (1537) deals at length with the process of canon resolution. A decade later Glarean, writing in praise of the accomplishments of Josquin and his contemporaries, equated mastery of canonic technique with a fundamental proficiency in composition whereby the craftsmanship of a composer could be tested; his Dodecachordon (1547) contains a veritable anthology of canonic art. Its concluding chapter, entitled ‘Concerning the skill of symphonetae [polyphonic composers]’, offers resolutions and commentary for canons by practically all of the outstanding composers of Josquin’s era, among them Obrecht, Isaac, Brumel, La Rue, Mouton and Senfl. Zarlino, in the third edition of his Istitutioni(1573), added a section dealing with instructions for improvising two-part canons on a plainchant. Similarly Sethus Calvisius discussed in his Melopoeia(a Latin condensation of Zarlino’s work, 1592) the procedure of extemporizing canonic exercises on a Lutheran hymn – vocal improvisation intended, to be sure, only for ‘especially skilled singers’.
Despite this evidence that an improvisatory tradition continued to sustain the use of canon up to the end of the 16th century, the heyday of its use by composers was coming to a close. A more didactic attitude can be seen to emerge in the great summaries of polyphonic art by theorists such as Artusi (L'arte del contraponto, 1598), Pontio (Dialogo, 1595), Cerone (El melopeo y maestro, 1613), Zacconi (Prattica di musica, 1622) and Picerli (Specchio secondo, 1631), as canon came to represent an older form of polyphony that was being augmented, if not supplanted, by the more fashionable harmonic approach of the Baroque.
In postulating the concept of a modern ‘practice’ of composition, a seconda pratica radically different from the prima pratica representing the polyphonic tradition, Monteverdi's generation assigned to the latter a role of increasingly conservative and doctrinal character. Canon became a symbol of the prima pratica, yet at the same time it entered the new literature of instrumental music. A group of canons concludes the first part of the keyboard collection Tabulatura nova(1624) by Samuel Scheidt, one of the first in a long line of 17th-century German organ masters connected with the Zarlino tradition through the teachings of Zarlino’s pupil Sweelinck. In this group two canons ‘ad decimam sine pausis’ are noteworthy. The canon sine pausis (‘canon without pauses’ – duplication of the original melodic line in 3rds, 10ths or 6ths by simultaneous commencement of the voices) suggests the strengthening of vertical harmonic thinking that characterized the contrapuntal technique of the High Renaissance and its theory of double counterpoint. Here, as in other examples of the time, canonic writing is linked to a cantus firmus upon which the canonic parts form contrapuntal lines whose placement is interchangeable. The trend reached a peak with the ‘polymorphous’ canons of P.F. Valentini, one of which, published in 1629 (Canone … sopra le parole del Salve regina … con le resolutioni a 2, 3, 4, e 5 voci), offered more than 2000 solutions; it became a model for numerous similar and equally astounding feats. At this point in the development of canonic literature the original use of the word ‘canon’ in the sense of a specific verbal precept directing the polyphonic realization of a single melodic line had largely been supplanted by the modern understanding of a texture of two or more lines in strict imitation. The word ‘canon’ was applied to the melodic line itself, for it served in all solutions as the rule or guide. Theorists of the 17th century such as Picerli (1631) and G.M. Bononcini (Musico prattico, 1673) continued to promote Zarlino's use of terms, but with diminishing clarity and purpose, as contemporary practice moved towards modern usage.
The teaching of contrapuntal discipline found a special expression during the 17th century in carefully organized collections of which the Musikalisches Kunstbuch by Johann Theile, a pupil of Schütz and teacher of Buxtehude, has become the best-known example. Though designed to summarize the technique of the past, these collections dealt extensively with modern forms. G.B. Vitali’s Artificii musicali (1689) combines with examples of canon and double counterpoint Inventioni curiose, capricii e sonate as well as a Sinfonia in canone. The juxtaposition of canon and sonata is even more pronounced in Theile’s Kunstbuch, which survives in a manuscript copy (1691) by Bach’s cousin J.G. Walther. Bach doubtless became acquainted with the work, and Theile’s compendium of canonic art points directly to Bach’s great canonic collections.
While the 17th century prepared the ground for the crowning achievements of instrumental canonic literature, the vocal round saw a significant revival in the English catch collections. The first of these, Thomas Ravenscroft’s Pammelia (1609), contains 100 works, some of them by Ravenscroft himself, that continue the vocal tradition of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance while at the same time representing a revival of the ancient traditions of popular canonic song, since their primary function was social rather than artistic. As the English madrigal declined, its place in the musical entertainment at gatherings and festivities was largely taken by a ‘mixed Varietie of pleasant Roundelays, and delightfull Catches’ (Ravenscroft’s subtitle). Ravenscroft’s Pammelia was followed by his catch collections (1611, 1618) and by numerous later publications, the most successful of which were issued by John Playford. This resurgence of the popular round must be understood in connection with broader developments in Baroque music, with the strengthening of harmonic consciousness and with the tendency towards structural periodization guided by harmonic functions. The erudition of 17th-century canon merged naturally with its more informal applications, as is illustrated in the immense canon output of Antonio Caldara. A two-volume manuscript collection of his canons compiled, as the title indicates, for outdoor entertainment (Divertimenti musicali per campagna, 1729) includes a series of pieces representing the fashionable contrapuntal solfeggiamento, methodical scale studies cast in increasingly complicated polyphonic garb. The combination of learned and sociable aspects of canon found a favourite expression in the type of canonic message or motto that traditionally embellished dedications, titles and engravings. One of the best-known examples of the kind was written by Bach.
The famous Bach portrait by Elias Haussmann (1746; see Bach, fig.4) shows the composer holding the manuscript of this work, a canon triplex (bwv1076). Carefully reproduced in the painting, it was composed at Bach’s initiation into the Society of the Musical Sciences founded by his pupil L.C. Mizler. While characteristic of the occasional and dedicatory purposes for which composers had used the canon as emblem of the craft since the Renaissance (it lived on in such examples as the exchange of canons between the two teachers of Beethoven, Haydn and Albrechtsberger, and Beethoven’s canonic messages to his friends), Bach’s portrait canon dates from the time of his most concentrated interest in the form. As an early canon (bwv1073, 1713) suggests, Bach had explored the canonic technique in discussions with J.G. Walther and, like his contemporaries J.F. Fasch and Telemann, included some extensive canons in chamber music works (e.g. the Violin Sonata bwv1015 and Suite for flute and strings bwv1067). The use of canon and double counterpoint in Bach’s Orgelbüchlein reflects an unbroken tradition of polyphonic organ music to which the cantus firmus canons in Bach’s chorale cantatas are closely related. But the bold blending of freest and strictest form (recitative and canon) that Spitta pointed out in the opening chorus of Bach’s A major Mass (bwv234) is representative of a new orientation in the last two decades of Bach’s life, a conscious return to Renaissance ideals that became a decisive influence on Bach’s style (see Wolff, 1968). The most significant examples of canonic writing from this period are contained in the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, the canonic variations on Vom Himmel hoch (bwv769) and the Art of Fugue. In addition, the rediscovery in 1975 of the 14 canons appended to Bach's personal copy of the Goldberg Variations more than doubled the number of known presentation or theoretical canons by him (Wolff, 1976). In all these works Bach pursued the canonic procedure to its limits; no longer serving merely to lend emphasis or cogency to the composer's part-writing, canon now resumed a primary role of artistic design and expression. The plan of the Goldberg Variations, which extends from a canon at the unison to one at the 9th, recalls the canonic plan of Palestrina's Missa ‘Repleatur os meum’, which in turn stems from Ockeghem's canonic Missa prolationum employing canon at every imitative interval. Indeed, Bach’s writing is as retrospective as it is modern in these last monuments of his creative career. In the Musical Offering the canon per augmentationem contrario motustands next to the canon per tonos. The latter variety – referred to also as ‘spiral’ or ‘modulating’ canon, since the harmonic structure of its melody prompts a winding course ‘through the keys’, eventually returning to its point of departure – reflects the newly won harmonic scope that also guided the plan of Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier and that is characteristic of the theoretical achievements of the Baroque period. As is particularly evident from Bach’s canon per tonos and from the series of canons in the Goldberg Variations, the highest ensemble and keyboard virtuosity merges in this final phase of Bach’s work with ultimate mastery of composition.
Bach’s unique achievement stands isolated in a period characterized by a general decline of the polyphonic ideal, in fact, by passionate expressions of opposition to contrapuntal art. F.W. Marpurg, the theorist who presented the first discussion of Bach’s fugal technique (Abhandlung von der Fuge, 1753–4), had to admit in the preface of his work that the very mention of the word ‘canon’ was apt to be greeted with ‘a cold shudder’; the great canonic heritage was now considered ‘barbaric’. In view of the changes of attitude towards canon in the 18th century, there can be little doubt that the natural ease with which Bach and Handel had absorbed elements of the stile antico had simply vanished in their own era. Counterpoint became an academic discipline. The set of canonic studies that Handel wrote some time before the composition of Messiah and eventually incorporated into the oratorio’s concluding ‘Amen’ chorus seemed so alien to later generations that the editor of Handel’s complete works (Chrysander) mistook them for Renaissance works that Handel had copied (see appendix to the facsimile edition of the autograph score of Messiah, 1892). There seems little justification, however, for regarding them or the canonic duet in Handel’s Utrecht Jubilate, for example, as exercises in a ‘learned’ style, one foreign to the idiom of the composer.
The canons that the young Mozart wrote under the influence of Padre Martini, as well as the canonic inscriptions that decorated Martini’s own treatises, marked a radical departure from the style of composition prevalent in their time. That the contrapuntal heritage could no longer be recaptured without conscious effort is borne out by Haydn’s and Mozart’s string quartet fugues of the 1770s, and it was only in the later works of the two Viennese masters that polyphony again rose to stylistic significance. The ‘Menuetto al canone’ with a trio in double canon by inversion, from Mozart’s wind serenade k388/384a, is one of the early indications of this change. In Haydn’s and Mozart’s work, canon returns on the whole to smaller forms than those cultivated in the early 18th century. Nevertheless, the entire scope of canonic literature is represented in the writings of both masters, ranging from sacred works and complex structures to miniatures and drinking-songs on coarse texts that (especially in Mozart’s canons) vie with those of the English catch literature. In his work as a teacher, Mozart followed the predominantly German Kunstbuch tradition in a set of canonic studies apparently written for his pupil Thomas Attwood. Yet his approach to canonic writing is entirely bound up with his early studies in Italy, whereas the impetus for Haydn’s canonic compositions was provided by his journeys to England in the 1790s. In his canon collection The Ten Commandments (1791, first published 1809) Haydn related the canonic procedure once more to the musical allegory of the Baroque period (‘command and I shall follow’; cf Bach’s ‘Dies sind die heilgen zehn Gebot’, Clavier-Übung, iii). The humorous round, on the other hand, found its way in Haydn’s writing even into a string quartet (op.76 no.2) as well as some earlier symphonies (e.g. no.44).
The title given to the edition of Beethoven’s 20 canons published for the Beethoven bicentenary, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Canons, from Letters, Cards, Album Leaves, and Other Personal Documents, describes the nature of a canonic output that is extremely modest compared with the canonic writing of 18th-century masters. Neither the fulfilment of the symphonic ideal nor the rise of Romantic song and opera in the 19th century offered a favourable climate for the canonic art, and the literature of canon remained limited to small occasional pieces and academic examples. The latter, however, achieved relative importance, especially in the works of Schumann, through the reawakened interest in the art of the Baroque period. Indeed, such works as the six canonic pieces in his op.56 (Studien für den Pedal-Flügel) had a decisive influence on the role of canon in the works of Brahms. More genuinely interested in canon than any other 19th-century composer, Brahms emulated Bach’s canonic keyboard variations in his opp.9, 21 and 24, and there are numerous canonic pieces in his fine choral settings, including a canon per tonos(Mir lächelt kein Frühling). Brahms’s predilection for canonic writing was kindled not only by his interest in Baroque music but also by his studies of the works of Renaissance masters; this widened historical grasp foreshadows the role that canonic technique was to assume in the 20th century. Yet the most conspicuous function of canon in the Renaissance and Baroque eras remained that of theoretical discipline. As is shown by titles of an abundance of didactic works (notable among them Salomon Jadassohn’s Kanon und Fuge, 1884), the textbook canon dominated the 19th-century attitude towards canonic writing.
Typical of this pedagogic interest in canon is Reger’s requirement of ‘1000 harmony exercises, 500 canons, and 100 fugues’. Conversely, with his early 111 ‘Canons for piano through all major and minor keys’ Reger gave the first suggestion of a commitment to Bach that was no longer purely Romantic, and the model of Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier inspired a number of similar modern keyboard works (e.g. Hindemith, Ludus tonalis, and Bartók, Mikrokosmos) in which the contrapuntal technique resumed a didactic role decidedly more sophisticated than that of mere exercise. The specific use of canon in Bartók’s Mikrokosmos is paralleled in various ensemble collections by Hindemith, in which elementary instrumental instruction is raised to an artistic level through the strict imitative texture. The use of imitative polyphony in pieces composed for practical use (Hindemith’s term Gebrauchsmusik) is characteristic of the 20th-century’s estrangement from Romantic sensibilities and the search for contrasting musical resources. These trends led to the use of canon in chamber and orchestral works, and also gave rise to a revival of choral art in which the singing, collecting and writing of canons served an important function. The essentially retrospective cultivation of choral canon is illustrated by a wealth of publications ranging from Fritz Jöde’s anthology Der Kanon, issued in 1937 (the compiler referred to it in his preface as ‘an outline history of music, or even history of thought, as reflected in canons’), to Stravinsky’s choral-orchestral arrangement of Bach’s canonic variations on Vom Himmel hoch (1956). Examples of canonic writing abound in the music of Schoenberg, in the later works of Stravinsky and, above all, in those of Webern, who was perhaps influenced by historical models through his work on Isaac's music. In Webern’s Concerto op.24 the germinating 12-note row is made up of three-note segments in the pattern original or prime form–retrograde inversion–retrograde–inversion, so that essential canonic principles serve for the very construction of the series, which has itself assumed the function of the ‘rule’ or ‘precept’ by which the composition unfolds.
While a number of revivals of canon in the 20th century may be related to interest in earlier musical procedures, it would be a mistake to claim that the resurgence of canon in that century was due primarily to historical awareness of the canonic heritage. For instance, mensural canon appeared in many of Messiaen's compositions, and Messiaen's pupil Boulez enlarged his notion of ‘rhythmic canon’ in a number of early works, writing canons in which one voice is the rhythmic retrograde of another, or in which the voices contain different arrangements of the same rhythmic cells. The ‘rhythmic canons’ of both Messiaen and Boulez are not necessarily canons in melodic structure, however, and therefore differ markedly from canonic procedures of the past. Similarly, music by 12-note composers employs the devices of retrograde motion, inversion and retrograde inversion, devices first exploited widely by composers before 1500. However, in serial composition such canonic procedures are more often presented without maintaining the rhythmic element, which again differentiates it from earlier styles. There were deeper musical reasons for 20th-century composers to return to ancient musical procedures such as canon than antiquarian interest. Canon provides a composer with a procedure for exploring melodic and harmonic space without relying on functional harmony as a guide. Canon creates its own harmonic functionality, resulting directly from melodic and contrapuntal considerations. Even minimalism, a style in many ways antithetical to serialism, was founded in part on the principle of canon. Certain early works by Steve Reich, such as Piano Phase (1967) or Clapping Music (1972) depend wholly on a continuously adjusting canon. Here the musical development may not rest with melodic or harmonic elements, but simply with the time intervals of imitation, and the continually changing polyphony that results. The example of minimalism, when contrasted with serialism, suggests that the resurgence of canon in the late 20th century was a completely natural development, a reassertion of the most basic elements of music: melody and repetition.
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P. Urquhart: ‘Calculated to Please the Ear: Ockeghem's Canonic Legacy’, TVNM, xlvii (1997), 72–98
C. Wolff: Der stile antico in der Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs (Wiesbaden, 1968)
C. Wolff: ‘Bach's Handexemplar of the Goldberg Variations: a New Source’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 224–41
S. Durante: ‘On Artificioso Compositions at the Time of Frescobaldi’, Frescobaldi Studies: Madison, WI, 1983, 195–217
E. Chafe: ‘Allegorical Music: the “Symbolism” of Tonal Language in the Bach Canons’,JM, iii (1984), 340–62
H. White: ‘Canon in the Baroque Era: some Precedents for the Musical Offering’, Bach, xv/4 (1984), 4–15
P. Cahn: ‘Christoph Graupners “Kanons” als Versuch einer systematischen Imitationslehre’,Musiktheorie, i (1986), 129–37
R. Böss: Die Kunst des Rätselkanons im Musikalischen Opfer (Wilhelmshaven, 1991)
O.E. Deutsch: ‘Haydns Kanons’, ZMw, xv (1932–3), 112–24, 172 only
J. Wetschky: Die Kanontechnik in der Instrumentalmusik von Johannes Brahms (Regensburg, 1967)
I. Bredenbach: ‘Missa canonica und Kyrie g-moll von Johannes Brahms: ein Beitrag zur Kanontechnik im Chorwerk von Johannes Brahms’, Musik und Kirche, lviii (1988), 84–92, 135–45
R.N. Freeman: ‘Johann Georg Albrechtsberger's 26 Canoni Aperti dei Varii Autori: Observations on Canonic Theory and Repertory in the Late 18th Century’, Musicologia humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 485–511
B. Rands: ‘The Use of Canon in Bartók's Quartets’, MR, xviii (1957), 183–8
R. Rollin: ‘Ligeti's Lontano: Traditional Canonic Technique in a New Guise’,MR, xli (1980), 289–96
G. Watkins: ‘The Canon and Stravinsky's Late Style’, Confronting Stravinsky: San Diego 1982, 217–46
K. Bailey: ‘Canon and Beyond: Webern's Op.31 Cantata’, MAn, vii (1988), 313–48
M. Sichardt: ‘Schönbergs Kanons’, Mitteilungen aus der Schönberg-Forschung, v (1992), 17–23
R.D. Morris: ‘The Structure of First-Species Canon in Modal, Tonal and Atonal Musics’,Intégral, ix (1995), 33–66
For further bibliography see Fugue.