Pachelbel’s Canon, also known as Canon in D, must be one of the most performed pieces of music of modern times, but that wasn’t always the case. Johann Pachelbel composed it during the Baroque era sometime in the late 17th century, though historians don’t have a clear date or occasion for its writing. It was only rediscovered in the early 20th century when a new edition was published as part of a push to revive music of the past.
“The early 20th century was the era of getting early music out and figuring out how to transcribe it and who could play it,” Elaine Sisman said in a New York Times article. “There was also a big early music revival starting in the 1950s with Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica, and suddenly, you had performances and recordings and people trying to figure out how this music actually came to be.”
A 1960 recording under conductor Jean-François Paillard brought it to wider acclaim, and then the pomp of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding in 1981 helped make it the choice for weddings. It has since been arranged for every instrumentation imaginable to bring out the beauty and grandeur of its crescendoing canon form, but I bet you’ve never heard it like this.
Japanese jazz virtuoso Hiromi performed her own version of Pachelbel’s Canon during a 2010 concert for Jazz in Marciac that had the audience enthralled. She began by playing just the bass notes as she placed a metal ruler on the treble strings. (The act of putting items in the piano to alter its sound is called “prepared piano.”) This gives an extra metallic effect to the melody as the continuo bass carries on. After building the layers of the canon, Hiromi begins to jazz things up by swinging the melody, eventually improvising her own melodies and bass lines while keeping the iconic chord progression.
In this video, George Collier transcribes her playing using MuseScore and embeds it at the bottom of the video to further illustrate this amazing adaptation of a Baroque classic.
Compare Hiromi’s version to the original:
