Stacked Canon and Renaissance Compositional Procedure

Abstract

The collection of four, eccentric Renaissance canons, for which I have invented the term provocatively displays how four masters of imitative writing squeezed contrapuntal coherence out of an inherently disorienting form. Although this type of piece was never destined to occupy the mainstream of composition or performance, the care required for its successful construction presents us with clear Renaissance compositional strategies which apparently were never expressed by theorists of the period. In addition, these pieces suggest new methods appropriate to analyzing canonic structures. I believe that attention to the relatively rare stacked canon will yield insights which can be extended to the compositional concerns and procedures within simpler, more traditional types of Renaissance canons and the canonic works of later musical periods. A stacked canon, as I define it, operates on the principle shown in Figure 1 that any voice which is a comes could itself also serve as a dux. For these pieces, any two consecutive voices will be related by the same interval. Renaissance composers judged this as a particularly interesting effect when the interval of the canon was not a unison, and I include this condition in my definition. Ockeghem, Mouton, Verdelot, and Willaert, are the first composers I have found to experiment with this form for an entire work. Their pieces are designed either with the interval of a fourth

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