"So you want to write a canon?" An historically-informed new approach for the modern theory class

Abstract

Canonic writing has been part of the education of music students for centuries. Considered a routine means of elaborating primary musical material in the Renaissance, it maintained an important place in the didactic writings of later periods. Yet perusals of historical treatises as well as modern counterpoint texts usually reveal very little information about how to compose a canon apart from a step-by-step approach involving writing a short amount of material in one part, copying it into a second part after a predetermined time distance, finding suitable material to continue the first part, and repeating this process until the end of the piece...The method I will present here focuses on two-part canonic imitation in regular motion, which is typically a student's first encounter with the topic and for which a systematic set of guidelines would be useful. I will not consider in detail every canonic possibility from unison to octave above or below, but instead focus on certain cases which can serve as models for writing other types of canon. The final part of my discussion will consider two-part canonic writing in the presence of a cantus firmus, examples of which abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theoretical and practical sources for canon.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.