Chapter 6: Canons

I am not sure why Canons popped into my mind as the next project for me to tackle.

Now that I have spent around 6 weeks visiting as I like to tell myself the Country of Canons I am happy to admit that it was a great time for me.  I will be happy to visit again in the future! 😊

In many ways it was an eye opening journey for me.

When you think of canons the idea of harmonies coming into being is not what you immediately will be thinking of.  Instead you will probably start humming “Frere Jacques . . . “, a canon with 4 sections. However each of these 4 sections has to co-exist with each of the other ones, which means they have to be in harmony in some way as they will be sang all together at the same time.

So if you take a little melody and break it into 4 sections in order to make it work as a canon it will not take long for you to discover when you play these sections at the same time that you have created many dissonances without even trying.

Melodies usually proceed in small connected intervals.  That makes them more singable compared to containing larger leaps between notes.  Playing one section of a melody on top of the next section will mean that the notes being played at the same time can be close enough to each other to create full or half note dissonances.

You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to realise that each section therefore needs to be such that it works harmoniously with all the other sections.  Trying to do this with one continuous melody will most likely turn into an impossibility.  You will probably decide to create a canon where each section has its own sort of “melody”.  So you may wonder if you are turning into an engineer creating melodies that will work harmoniously with the other sections?

One way to do this is to create one melody and then repeat that melody at a harmonious higher level, say a major or minor third up or down.

I am of course not a brain surgeon either so that is exactly what I tried my hand at first.

Let me play it for you first and then discuss it a bit more:

[button Play Video]

In this piece I used the canon idea first for 2 instruments and then for 3 and later for 4.  I also broke the canon into sections and played them on their own to see what that would sound like.  In addition I composed a small polyphonic 2 instrument opener and closing part to give the composition a place to live in, I hope, happily.

It is easy to get surprised by dissonances with a canon composition.  I tend to feel OK about full note dissonances (if there are not too many of them) but do not like half note dissonances.  Whatever the type of dissonance it is easy to create many of them in any new version of a canon composition, each of them forcing you to fix the  problems you discovered.

I frequently found the harmonies that the canon composition created without me having “engineered” them consciously, at times surprising but often interesting and pleasing.

I split up the canon and played sections in the middle “on their own” in this piece and found their effects interesting for me to listen to. When you listen to a canon from beginning to end it is hard to appreciate a separate section as much as compared to when you play it all on its own.

After I had put this first canon to bed the question came to me how a canon would sound if you were to repeat after only one note?  Then what if the gap was 2 notes or three?

Once such an idea comes into being I cannot simply let it be.  The outcome was lots and lots of experiments, some of which I want to share with you.

Let me jump into the first one.  If you press the button Play Audio first and then press the button  View Score next you will be able to see the score and listen to the audio at the same time.

First I play the melodic Idea and only on bar 14 does the canon start, i.e. with a repeat of only one note. I add an ending to make it all come to a happy end.-:)

You can see immediately that each subsequent note is very often a minor or major third jump or more so that when the note is repeated by the second voice it should not create a dissonance.  Mind, you it still does at times.  What is interesting to me is the “character” that the sound takes on when both voices are played together.

Next I tried a combo, consisting of a section with a one note only gap between voice 1 and 2 and then change to a 2 note gap. As I usually do I end the piece with a “happy ending”:

I really like what it turned into!  Interesting is that it is not possible to anticipate this simply by listening to the melody.  I feel the point here is that the harmony that in this case is being “generated” by the canon changes the character of the melody in a surprising and pleasant way.  I have no problem with that since all melody ideas pop into my head unbidden just like these harmonies pop into being unbidden by me as the “composer”.-:)

Next in line, of course, was to try a 3 note gap.  I wanted to stop at 3 since Frere Jacques has a 4 note gap already so I would not be trying something new there.

Somehow when I started to play with 3 note gap ideas things grew into a lot more.  I combined the 3 canon approach with a separate longer melody idea of 2 voices that I felt would go well with the canon.  I hope you like it, here it is:

[button Play Video]

Somehow I thought that I could work on these ideas a bit more rather than stop there and move on.  So I spent a few days  trying this and that and finally came up with a second way to show these ideas:

I thought my time in Canon Country had come to an end but at the beginning I had made the mistake of asking Google about canons and learned about something I had never heard before, namely a Crab Canon.  This is a single voice melodic line that is being played by 2 instruments, once from the beginning and at the same time my another instrument at the end.

I felt I could not leave Canon Country without visiting that part of its world as well.  Needless to say there are many ways to get lost in Crab Canon.  What I found interesting is that if something sounds nice and becoming when being played “forward” there is no guarantee it will sound so when being played backwards.

I decided to try and use ideas from my Canon-1 and Canon-3 compositions to create 2 crab canons of my own:

I had to create a score with 2 instruments in order to be able to create an audio file since with Dorico or Cubase you cannot tell the system to play one instrument from the start and the other from the end. I repeated the crab canon twice in this audio file before coming to a “happy ending” as usual.

Here is another crab canon:

I realised that I had barely touched the surface of what the essence of canon composing is.  So I decided to visit ChatGPT and discuss what I experienced and get more insight.

Of course, ChatGPT cannot help me with any specific canon composition and most of what it told me is sort of philosophical.  What I found interesting though is that it touches on what I experienced.  If you have used ChatGPT before you will know that it can become quite verbose.  It did come up with what I thought was very insightful feedback (abbreviated by me below):

“In a canon:

• Harmony is not designed

• Harmony emerges

This gives canon harmony a special quality:

• It feels discovered rather than invented

• It feels true even when dissonant

This is why canons often feel humble, even devotional.

Unlike counterpoint with contrasting themes, a canon contains no argument.

There is:

• No debate

• No opposition

• No contradiction of material

Yet tension still arises — not from disagreement, but from overlap

Because it shows:

• how harmony can emerge without harmonic intention

• how technique becomes revelation

• how discipline uncovers intuition rather than suppressing it

Free counterpoint is music built on difference.

Each voice:

• has its own melodic identity

• its own expressive intention

• its own rhythm of breathing

Where free counterpoint explores relationships between voices, canon explores:

• identity

• inevitability

• consequence

Free counterpoint explores the coexistence of independent voices, while canon explores the persistence of a single identity across time. Where counterpoint invites dialogue, canon demands acceptance; where counterpoint persuades, canon reveals. This may be why canon so often feels sacred — it replaces personal choice with inevitability, and expression with truth.

A canon doesn’t ask:

Is this constructed well?

It asks:

Does this melody remain truthful when it meets itself?

If a melodic idea:

• has clear direction

• breathes naturally

• contains inner tension and release

…then canon will amplify its character.

If it doesn’t, canon exposes that mercilessly.

So the goal is not to design harmony, but to cultivate melodic integrity — the kind that can survive self-overlap.”

Well if you want philosphical statements ChatGPT is certainly very good at it but I don’t think it will help you in discovering how to compose wonderful canons with exciting and surprising harmonies.

So I had a last quick question re Canons for ChatGPT: As a composer when I start putting melodic ideas into my score I have yet no idea what the resulting harmonies will be when I play it in some form of canon.  It feels a bit like a crab shoot, sort of a trial and error effort.  Is this unavoidable?

This is the answer I got:

“Short answer first — and it’s an honest one:

Yes, that feeling is largely unavoidable.”

In general I find what ChatGPT tells me insightful but not very useful. What I feel at the moment is that you need to consider the “shape” and “structure” of a melodic idea you want to use in a canon and then consider when it would make sense to repeat it. What I mean is that the repeat has to somehow “fit into” what you came up with as an idea. Then you try it out and see whether it worked or not. It will also depend on whether you are repeating with one or more instruments. I noticed that you get interesting effects when the repeat instrument plays in part at a higher level than the originating one. Somehow the mind still manages to keep them separate is what I noticed.

In summary my time with canons was full of surprises for me, sort of like an Alice in Wonderland experience!  I am glad I did it and can only recommend you try it out as well! I certainly am planning to come back and experiment a lot more and hopefully manage to create some memorable music at the same time.