Academic literature on the topic 'Musical canon'

The article focuses on 14 canons by J.S. Bach, BWV 1087, written by the composer in the printed copy of the Clavierübung IV (Goldberg Variations) under the title Various Сanons on the First Eight Foundation Notes of the Preceding Aria. The article compares this cycle with the canons from the Goldberg Variations. In particular, it explores the information accompanying the canons. Every third Goldberg Variation is called Canon. This first group of canons is marked by an imitative sequential form of variation with a completely open and fixed musical text. The second group of Fourteen Canons is marked by specific encryption. Here, the notation does not contain the complete melodic material: the melodic material given is the foundation for the full text of the composition to be derived by means of, inter alia, titles and a set of signs that serve as a guide to their reading. Each of the 14 encrypted canons features an eight-sound soggetto as an initial construction of the bass melody from the Goldberg Variations theme, the Aria. As a canon-forming voice on the whole, in part or as a cantus firmus, an eight-sound theme is the audible and visible basis of all the canons in question. Due to its brevity and constructive isolation, the theme is perceived entirely and at once. The analysis of the encrypted canons BWV 1087 revealed parallels to the three constituent parts of an emblem: the word (a motto) is the soggetto, the image is the musical text of the canon as a voluminous and polysemantic entity subject to decoding, and, finally, a signature that allows you to “read the depicted”. The latter, in case of the canons, implies hearing the decrypted whole and understanding the accompanying signs and explanations.

La emblemática como tipo textual híbrido articula múltiples códigos visuales y escritos en una estructura tripartita establecida en Alciato. En este trabajo se presenta la teorización de un cuarto código que se integra al género tradicional: la música, y que se manifestó en la alquimia y en los libros de facistol. La emblemática musical eleva el funcionamiento de la redundancia y el doble anclaje semántico con la idea de resonancia. El canon como forma cíclica en un contexto ritual y pedagógico confiere al libro de facistol más de una función. Para explicar los itinerarios de lectura se toma el ejemplo de Juan del Vado en su obra para Carlos II.

A canon of old musical works first appeared in public performance in eighteenth-century England. Its intellectual origins can be traced to a new mode of empirical musical thinking that focused upon musical practice rather than philosophical or scientific theory. Canonic judgments and repertories developed as a source of authority within this intellectual framework. While developments either in canonic thinking or in repertories of old works appeared in many European countries during the eighteenth century, only in England did both aspects develop significantly in the period. Although a general reconstitution of canons was taking place within the arts at the time, the changes that came about in musical culture took their own particular direction.

An examination of a dozen paintings and several woodcuts by the Ferrarese artist Dosso Dossi (ca. 1490-1542) suggests that he belongs to the select company of other doubly gifted painters of the sixteenth century who were also musicians. The evidence rests on the accuracy of Dosso's depictions of musical instruments, his knowledge of their symbolism, and above all, from his inclusion of two canons, one circular and the other triangular, in a painting (ca. 1524-1534) once at the Este castle in Ferrara, and now in the Museo Horne, Florence. Whereas the composer of the former canon remains unknown, that of the latter is Josquin Desprez. The work is Josquin's celebrated proportional canon from the Agnus Dei of his Mass, L'homme armé super voces musicales. Musical aspects of Dosso's complex allegory reside not only in the relationships of the two canons on the right side of the picture to three hammers belonging to a blacksmith on the left side, but also in the tablets of stone on which the canons are inscribed. A brief notice of the changing relationships between music and painting at this period sets the stage for a more thorough examination of statements by Leonardo da Vinci concerning both arts, statements that help provide a conceptual framework for Dosso's allegory of music.

Joseph Kerman has suggested a distinction crucial in defining the meaning of ‘canon’ in musical culture: repertory, he argues, was simply the performance of old works; canon, by contrast, is their reverence on a critical plane and in a literary context. The distinction is a fertile one, for it challenges us to define when works were not just offered by convention, but when they functioned as models for musical taste critically and aesthetically. The distinction can be extremely fruitful in tracing the early history of the canon – its origins in repertory and gradual evolution into its modern form. What I would like to show here is how repertories grew up originally without true status as canon; before canon there was repertory, and that is where the whole tradition began. In inquiring just where the modern practice of performing old music regularly came about we can look into some of the most fundamental social and intellectual bases upon which the tradition was established.