What Is a "Canon" in Musical Form?

The Canon in Music Theory

Hello again, this is Duane with more Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about a form, a musical form called the Cannon. As you know, there’s lots of musical forms, and in classical music we have the Sonata form, and so on and so forth. I’ll be talking about some of those in the days to come. I’d like to talk about a simple form called the Canon.

In elementary school you and I probably knew the Canon as a round. Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, brother John, are you sleeping, are…you know, the second part would start. The second part is an imitation of the first part, it just starts in a different point in the music, doesn’t it? That’s all a Canon is. I remember in some Christmas music that some of my students were playing this year we did a Canon on March of the Three Kings, where it went something like this. The theme, as I recall, went like this, and then it broke into a Canon. One part started, and then the other part started. You get the idea.

In our little illustration there you can seeit, it’s real simple. The first part starts, now the second part starts, and so on. That’s all there is to a Canon. Canon is the Latin word meaning law, so you lay down a theme, you lay down the law, and then you imitate it, higher or lower. There are Canons that are exact, in other words like this Canon in our illustration starts in the same note an octave lower. There’s Canons at a fifth, Canons at a fourth, Canons at a third, being they’re a fifth away, or a fourth away, or a third away, a sixth away, something like that, all kinds of possibilities.

In your playing too, when you improvise you can certainly use the idea of a Canon in your improvisation, or your arranging. Even it doesn’t have to be a long Canon like I just illustrated, it could be a three note Canon. In other words, if you’re right hand goes, your left hand could follow it, and you get the same idea. It’s like an inexact echo, but it portrays the same kind of feeling.

That’s what a Cannon’s about. Just one of the hundreds of thousands of good stuffs in music that you really ought to know. See you next month, bye.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyIh79hMyLQ&feature=youtu.be