Pachelbel's Canon in D and Barber's Adagio for Strings

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Recommended: Vocal music in the baroque era

The two pieces chosen for this paper are particularly famous and are recognizable audibly, if not by name, by the majority of western populations. Pachelbel’s Canon in D was virtually forgotten from the 1700’s until it was rediscovered in 1919 by Gustav Beckmann. It gradually gained publicity, and burst into the popular culture after being used as the score for a movie, it is now by far the most famous canon and of the most well known pieces of baroque music.

The canon is a musical form popular in the Baroque period and is characterized by imitative counterpoint in which multiple voices, in this case violins, play the same piece of music but start at different times and in different keys. Pachelbel wrote his canon for 3 violins and a basso continuo which may have been a bass or a harpsichord. It is a strict canon in which the first voice is imitated precisely by the others for the duration of the piece. It contains 3 parts in two bar intervals with the new voices introduced at said two bar intervals.

Another characteristically baroque feature of the Canon is the use of a Basso Continuo. During the Renaissance and earlier periods, the bass was used as a melodic device as the lowest voice, equal to the any other instrument. During the 17th century, the bass began the transition to becoming a harmonic device providing a ‘backbone’ for which it is now almost exclusively used. In Canon, the bass serves a double purpose as a Basso Ostinato or Ground Bass, a melodic device which entails the continuous repetition of the same two bar sequence for the duration of the piece.

It also has an associated gigue, a classically baroque dance piece that departs from the strict canon form in favor of a livelier more jolly melody. In the ba...

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...Web. 15 Dec. 2011. .

Millar, H. M. "Henry Purcell and the Ground Bass." Music and Letters 29.4 (1948): 340. Print.

"Adagio for Strings." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. .

"Pachelbel's Canon." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. .

Paravonian, Rob. "Pachelbel Rant." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 21 Nov. 2006. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. .

Schwartz, Steve. "Samuel Barber - Adagio for Strings, Op. 11." Classical Net, 1995. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. .

"The Impact of Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' : NPR, 4 Nov. 2006. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. .

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