What Is a Canon in Music?

Listen to my podcast on canons and you will understand:

And here is a transcript of the podcast:

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 “Canon.” As you know there’s lots of musical forms, and in classic music, we have like the Sonata form and so on and so forth. I’ll be talking about some of those in the days to come. but today we will take up the canon in music.

Now a canon is not a cannon – they are spelled differently and certainly make a much different sound!

I’d like to talk about a simple form called the “Canon.” Now, in elementary school, you and I probably knew the Canon as a round. Are [Duane playing piano] you [Duane playing piano] sleeping, [Duane playing piano] are [Duane playing piano] you [Duane playing piano] sleeping, [Duane playing piano] brother John. [Duane playing piano] Are [Duane playing piano] you [Duane playing piano] sleeping … 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 in years past, we did a Canon on March of the Three Kings where I went something like this. [Duane playing piano] The theme as I recall went like this. [Duane playing piano] Then it broke into a Canon, one part started and then the other part started. [Duane playing piano]

You get the idea. In our little illustration there, you can see it’s real simple. [Duane playing piano] The first part starts, now the second part starts. [Duane playing piano] and so on. That’s all there is to a Canon.

Canon, it’s a 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, right? There’s canons at a fifth, canons at a fourth, canons at a third. There are fifth away or a fourth away or a third away, sixth away, something like that. All kinds of possibilities, and in your playing too. When you improvise, you can certainly use the idea of a canon in your improvisation or your arranging. It doesn’t have to be a long canon like I just illustrated. It could be a three note canon. In other words if your right hand goes, [Duane playing piano] your left hand could follow it. You get the same idea. It’s kind of like inexact echo, but it portrays the same kind of feeling.

That’s what a canon is about. Just one of the hundreds or thousands of Good Stuffs in Music that You Really Ought to Know. See you next month. Bye.

For more information about the canon, read this article in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(music)
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One of the elements of knowing music and being able to figure out what is going on in a song is the subject of chord progressions. Click below for information on chord progressions:

Chord Progressions & The Riffs & Runs That Flow Out Of Them!

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