page_title: Pachelbel's Canon
section_title: Analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Pachelbel's Canon / Analysis
context_page_description: Pachelbel's Canon is an accompanied canon by the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel in his Canon and Gigue for 3 violins and basso continuo. It is sometimes called Canon and Gigue in D or Canon in D. Neither the date nor the circumstances of its composition are known, and the oldest surviving manuscript copy of the piece dates from the 19th century.
  Like his other works, Pachelbel's Canon, although popular during his lifetime, went out of style, and remained in obscurity for centuries. A 1968 arrangement and recording of it by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra gained popularity over the next decade, and in the 1970s the piece began to be recorded by many ensembles; by the early 1980s its presence as background music was deemed inescapable. From the 1970s to the late 2010s, elements of the piece, especially its chord progression, were used in a variety of pop songs. Since the 1980s, it has also been used frequently in weddings and funeral ceremonies in the Western world.
  The canon was originally scored for three violins and basso continuo and paired with a gigue. Both movements are in the key of D major.
context_section_description: Pachelbel's Canon combines the techniques of canon and ground bass. Canon is a polyphonic device in which several voices play the same music, entering in sequence. In Pachelbel's piece, there are three voices engaged in canon (see Example 1), but there is also a fourth voice, the basso continuo, which plays an independent part.
  The bass voice repeats the same two-bar line throughout the piece.
  The common musical term for this is ostinato, or ground bass (see the example below).
  The eight chords suggested by the bass are represented in the table below:
  The eight chords of this progression follow a sequential pattern known as the Romanesca. This progression has been identified as a common seventeenth- and eighteenth-century schema by Robert Gjerdingen.
  In Germany, Italy, and France of the 17th century, some pieces built on ground bass were called chaconnes or passacaglias; such ground-bass works sometimes incorporate some form of variation in the upper voices. While some writers consider each of the 28 statements of the ground bass a separate variation, one scholar finds that Pachelbel's canon is constructed of just 12 variations, mostly four bars in length, and describes them as follows:
  (bars 3–6) quarter notes (Brit.: crotchets)
  (bars 7–10) eighth notes (Brit.: quavers)
  (bars 11–14) sixteenth notes (Brit.: semiquavers)
  (bars 15–18) leaping quarter notes, rest
  (bars 19–22) thirty-second-note (Brit.: demisemiquaver) pattern on scalar melody
  (bars 23–26) staccato, eighth notes and rests
  (bars 27–30) sixteenth-note extensions of melody with upper neighbor notes
  (bars 31–38) repetitive sixteenth-note patterns
  (bars 39–42) dotted rhythms
  (bars 43–46) dotted rhythms and sixteenth-note patterns on upper neighbor notes
  (bars 47–50) syncopated quarter- and eighth-note rhythm
  (bars 51–56) eighth-note octave leaps
  Pachelbel's Canon thus merges a strict polyphonic form (the canon) and a variation form (the chaconne, which itself is a mixture of ground bass composition and variations). Pachelbel skillfully constructs the variations to make them "both pleasing and subtly undetectable."
caption: Example 1. The first 9 bars of the Canon in D. The violins play a three-voice canon over the ground bass to provide the harmonic structure. Colors highlight the individual canonic entries.
exif: {}