page_title: Canon (music)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Canon (music) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Handel, final Variation from Chaconne in G major, HWV 442
context_page_description: In music, a canon is a contrapuntal compositional technique that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration. The initial melody is called the leader, while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower. The follower must imitate the leader, either as an exact replication of its rhythms and intervals or some transformation thereof. Repeating canons in which all voices are musically identical are called rounds—"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Frère Jacques" are popular examples.
  An accompanied canon is a canon accompanied by one or more additional independent parts that do not imitate the melody.
context_section_description: During the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque—that is, through the early 18th century—any kind of imitative musical counterpoints were called fugues, with the strict imitation now known as canon qualified as fuga ligata, meaning "fettered fugue" (Bridge 1881, 76; Mann, Wilson, and Urquhart n.d.; Walker 2000, 1). Only in the 16th century did the word "canon" begin to be used to describe the strict, imitative texture created by such a procedure (Mann, Wilson, and Urquhart n.d.). The word is derived from the Greek "κανών", Latinised as canon, which means "law" or "norm", and may be related to 8th century Byzantine hymns, or canons, like the Great Canon by St. Andrew of Crete. In contrapuntal usage, the word refers to the "rule" explaining the number of parts, places of entry, transposition, and so on, according to which one or more additional parts may be derived from a single written melodic line. This rule was usually given verbally, but could also be supplemented by special signs in the score, sometimes themselves called canoni (Bridge 1881, 76). The earliest known non-religious canons are English rounds, a form first given the name rondellus by Walter Odington at the beginning of the 14th century (Mann, Wilson, and Urquhart n.d.); the best known is Sumer Is Icumen In (composed around 1250), called a rota ("wheel") in the manuscript source (Sanders 2001a; Sanders 2001b). The term "round" only first came to be used in English sources in the 16th century (Johnson 2001).
  Canons featured in the music of the Italian Trecento and the 14th-century ars nova in France. An Italian example is "Tosto che l'alba" by Gherardello da Firenze. In both France and Italy, canons were often featured in hunting songs. The medieval and modern Italian word for hunting is "caccia", while the medieval French word is spelled "chace" (modern spelling: "chasse"). A well-known French chace is the anonymous Se je chant mains. Richard Taruskin (2010, 331) describes Se je chant mains as evoking the atmosphere of a falcon hunt: "The middle section is truly a tour de force, but of a wholly new and off-beat type: a riot of hockets set to 'words' mixing French, bird-language, and hound-language in an onomatopoetical mélange." Guillaume de Machaut also used the 3-voice "chace" form in movements from his masterpiece Le Lai de la Fontaine (1361). Referring to the setting of the fourth stanza of this work, Taruskin (2010, 334–35) says "a well-wrought chace can be far more than the sum of its parts; and this particular chace is possibly Machaut's greatest feat of subtilitas."
  An example of late 14th century canon which featured some of the rhythmic complexity of the late 14th century ars subtilior school of composers is La harpe de melodie by Jacob de Senleches. According to Richard Hoppin (1978, 468), "This virelai has two canonic voices over a free and textless tenor."
  In many pieces in three contrapuntal parts, only two of the voices are in canon, while the remaining voice is a free melodic line. In Dufay's song "Resvelons nous, amoureux", the lower two voices are in canon, but the upper part is what David Fallows (1982, 89) describes as a "florid top line":
  Both J. S. Bach and Handel featured canons in their works. The final variation of Handel's keyboard Chaconne in G major (HWV 442) is a canon in which the player's right hand is imitated at the distance of one beat, creating rhythmic ambiguity within the prevailing triple time:
  An example of a classical strict canon is the Minuet of Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2 (White 1976, 66). "Throughout its sinewy length, between upper and lower strings. Here is the superbly logical fulfilment of the two-part octave doubling of Haydn's earliest divertimento minuets" (Hughes 1966, p. 49):
  Beethoven's works feature a number of passages in canon. The following comes from his Symphony No. 4:
  Antony Hopkins (1981, 108) describes the above as "a delightfully naïve canon". More sophisticated and varied in its treatment of intervals and harmonic implications is the canonic passage from the second movemen
caption: Handel, final Variation (no. 62) from Chaconne in G major, HWV 442
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