by Johann Pachelbel
One two-bar bass line, twenty-eight times, with a canon built on top of it.
Pachelbel’s canon survives in a single handwritten copy, made long after his death, and nobody knows when he wrote it — somewhere around 1700 is the usual guess. It was printed for the first time in 1919 and then ignored for another fifty years, until a 1968 recording by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra turned it into one of the most played pieces of music in the world. It has been at weddings ever since.
The piece is built on a ground bass: two bars of eight descending notes, repeated without alteration twenty-eight times from the first bar to the last. Over that ground three upper voices enter two bars apart and play exactly the same melody as one another, each two bars behind the one before — that is the canon. The variations grow busier as they go, from long held notes to running sixteenths, and thin out again at the end.
Written for three violins and a basso continuo. Every piano version is an arrangement, and how hard it is depends on which one you play.
On the piano this is really an arranger’s piece: the original has four players, and one pianist has to choose which lines to keep. A simple arrangement is well within a first year’s reach, and it is unusually good practice — the bass is the same eight notes over and over, so you learn to hold a steady pulse and to hear harmony change underneath a tune. A fuller arrangement, keeping all three upper voices, becomes a real exercise in carrying several lines at once with two hands.
Because the bass never changes, slowing the tempo costs the piece nothing musically and buys a lot: the pulse is the point, and the pulse is easier to hear slowly. Wait mode keeps the upper voices honest where they cross.
No levelled arrangement for this one yet — you play the score as it stands, with the app's tempo control, wait mode and one-hand practice to get you there. Levelled arrangements are added a curated batch at a time. See the Library
