Musical forms - Canon

Five attractive college kids go out on a camping trip out in the woods, way out in the middle of nowhere.  They stay in a cabin out by the lake.  The locals warn them of strange things that have been lurking around the cabin, but the kids laugh at them and go out to the cabin anyway.

You know that one by one, each of the five kids will meet a gruesome end, and at the end of the movie the trap will be reset for the next group of college kids unlucky enough to come by.

Or imagine perhaps this plot:

A young man, having just gotten out of a bad situation, is on the train heading off to start a new life.  On the train, he meets a young woman.  They talk, they laugh, they have a good time.  She gives him her phone number before getting off the train.  But when he gets to his destination, and checks his pocket, he finds that the slip of paper is gone.

You know that the rest of the movie will consist of him tracking down the girl, overcoming obstacles in his way, and at the end of the movie the two of them will be together again and they will live happily ever after.

Movies have forms.  There's the horror flick, the boy-meets-girl flick, action flicks, western flicks… each type of movie has its own schtick.  If we know what kind of movie we're about to see, we already  have a pretty good idea of how the plot will unfold.  We know what to expect, and when we see something happen on the screen, we know how it's going to fit in with the rest of the movie as a whole.

Music is the same way.   The songs you listen to on the radio, the majority of them are put together the same way.  They have a common structure - a common form.  

Form is a word you're going to hear a lot in this essay, so let's define what exactly form is.

Form refers to how many different sections there are within a larger piece of music, how they are arranged, and how they relate to each other.  

If I have two sections of music within a piece or song, for example, the second section might be a repetition of the first.  It may be an imitation or variation of the first.  It may be a development of the first - taking the musical ideas expressed in the first section and going further.  Or it may be a contrasting section, something that will be developed on its own later.  Or perhaps not.

As a point of illustration, here's one of my favorite indie rock songs.  

Animal Collective - My Girls

Maybe you liked this song, maybe you didn't.  Either way, that's OK.  Did this song surprise you in any way?  Was there anything strange about how this song was put together?

Well, no, not really.  It's a rock song, and it sounds like a rock song.  Broken up into sections, it sounds like this:

1.  Intro

2.  Verse  (There isn't much I feel I need…)

3.  Chorus  (I don't mean to seem like care about material things…)

4.  Repeat of verse

5.  Chorus (x2)

6.  Outro - song fades to nothingness

There's an intro, an outro, verse, and chorus.  The verse and chorus are two different sections that contrast with each other to give variety to the piece.  The into and outro are related to the accompaniment in both the verse and chorus.

It's a very typical rock song formula, in fact so typical that it has a technical name: thirty-two bar form.  (With a name like thirty-two bar form, it sounds like it ought to have something to do with drinking establishments, but sadly it doesn't.)  A lot of rock songs have an instrumental bridge in between the first chorus and the repeat of the verse - a chance for the guitarist to show off without the singer getting in the way - but this one doesn't.  You probably didn't pay too much attention to the structure of the song as you listened to it.  The way the song rolled out, you pretty much had an instinctive grasp of what was going to come next.

There isn't much I feel I need

But a solid soul, and the love I bleed

But with a little girl, and by my spouse

I only want a proper house

I don't care for fancy things

Or to take part in a pressured race

But to provide for one who asks

I will with heart on my father's grave

I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like social status

I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls

Whatever you thought of the song, it sure is a nice sentiment, isn't it?

Let's try something a bit different.  Same group, different song. 

Animal Collective - College

What did you think?  Did it follow the same form as My Girls?

Well no, it didn't.  There was no intro and no verse at the beginning of the song.  The vocals were on a neutral syllable, in three part harmony, often going into some fairly close harmony.  The style is more reminiscent of a college glee ensemble, or perhaps a barbershop quartet.  There's just one line: "You don't have to go to college."  And the song is over.

If you're left scratching your head, it's because the song didn't conform to any of the standard formulas that a song is supposed to sound like.  It didn't sound *like* anything.  I kinda think that was Animal Collective's whole point.  The focus is on the one line, not on anything else.

The scope of what counts as classical music is quite a bit broader than what counts as rock music.  Rock music has been around for about 60 years; the canon of classical music that is commonly performed today goes back about 400 years.  Moreover, the types of ensembles you'll encounter in classical music are a lot more varied in classical music than in rock or pop.  Rock music requires a guitarist, a drummer, a bass, and vocals.  A typical band is three to five people.  In classical music, on the other hand, you can have an ensemble consisting of a full orchestra plus chorus, a single instrumental soloist, or nearly anything in between.  And so, over the span of 400 years, a wide variety of music forms evolved to accommodate the type of piece being played, the number of instruments involved, the accumulated history of all the music that had been done up to that point, and the will and creativity of the individual composer, as artist and innovator.

The names of some of these forms may be familiar to you.  Binary form.  Ternary form.  Canon.  Fugue.  French overture.  Ritornello form.  Menuet and trio form.  Theme and variations.  Rondo form.  Sonata form.  If you don't recognize some of these terms, that's good.  Within a few months, you'll be familiar with all of them!

Let's start out with the simplest of all musical forms: canon.  Canons are also called rounds, as in "Row, Row, Row Your Boat".  A canon consists of one theme that is repeated over and over again.  Each voice comes in at a different time, resulting in harmony as different sections of the theme overlap with each other.  Often the theme of a canon is sung in unison (all together) at the beginning of the piece so that the theme is easier to pick out as individual voices come in.

Time for some music.  Here's a great example of a canon, written by Renaissance composer Orlando di Lasso.  The text of the piece is "musica est Dei donum optimi", or in English, "Music is the greatest gift of God."  

Orlando di Lasso - Musica Dei donum

This is a canon in four, or for four voices.  It's for four voices because four voices are singing by the time the first voice makes its first repetition.

Mozart was also a fan of writing canons.  Although Lasso's Musica Dei donum is often performed by high school and college choirs, Mozart's canons are… not.

Mozart - Difficile Lectu (canon a 4)

Difficile lectu was written by Mozart in either 1786 or 1787.  This was not a piece ever meant for public performance; this was a piece written by Mozart strictly for his friends.  One friend of his, a Bavarian singer by the name of Johann Nepomuk Peyerl, had an accent that was rather strong by Viennese standards.  And so Mozart wrote a canon to poke fun at him.

The text of the canon is the following Latin-esque gibberish:

Difficile lectu midi mars et jonicu difficile.

However, the text as it would have been pronounced by Peyerl would have been different:

Difficile leck du mich im Arsch…   (leck du mich im Arsch = "kiss my ass")

In addition, the word jonicu, when repeated, flips itself over to become cujoni, which is Italian for "testicles".  Balls balls balls balls balls balls...

Here's another dirty little canon by our friend Wolfgang, this one for six voices.  This one is one of my favorites because of all the percussive consonants in the middle parts once all the voices come in.  It adds a certain rhythm to the piece.

Mozart - Leck Mich im Arsch (canon a 6)

Finally, an example of what fun things you can do with a canon besides repeat the same line over and over again until all the voices get tired or bored.  And demonstration that canons aren't just something for the history books.  Check out this canon by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, for four trumpets, four trombones, and percussion.

Arvo Pärt - Arbos (1986)

You can probably tell that the trumpets are playing the same dotted rhythm over and over again: dum da-dum da-dum da-dum...  But what are the other parts doing?  Well, they're playing the same part as the trumpets... only slower.  The lower trumpet part is playing the part at half the speed, and the trombones are playing at one quarter the speed.  This kind of canon is called a mensuration canon.

You may have noticed that I've left one musical piece off the list.  What about the really famous canon, the one Pachelbel wrote?  Although that piece contains elements of canon in it, it's actually an example of a different kind of musical form, one popular during the Baroque era, called passacaglia.  We'll be getting into that next time!