Analysis
Pachelbel's Canon combines the techniques of canon and ground bass. Canon is a polyphonic device in which several voices play the same music, entering in sequence. In Pachelbel's piece, there are three voices engaged in canon (see Example 1), but there is also a fourth voice, the basso continuo, which plays an independent part.
The bass voice keeps repeating the same two-bar line throughout the piece. The common musical term for this is ostinato, or ground bass (see Example 2). The chords suggested by this bass are:
| chord | scale degree | roman numeral | |
| 1 | D major | tonic | I |
| 2 | A major | dominant | V |
| 3 | B minor | submediant | vi |
| 4 | F♯ minor | mediant | iii |
| 5 | G major | subdominant | IV |
| 6 | D major | tonic | I |
| 7 | G major | subdominant | IV |
| 8 | A major | dominant | V |
Similar sequences appear elsewhere in classical music. Handel used it for the main theme and all variations thereof throughout the second movement of his Organ Concerto Op. 7 No. 5 in G minor, HWV 310. Mozart employed it both for a passage in Die Zauberflöte (1791), at the moment where the three boys first appear and in the last movement of his Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488 (1786). He may have learned the sequence from Haydn, who had used it in the minuet of his string quartet Opus 50 No. 2, composed in 1785. Neither Handel's, nor Haydn's, nor Mozart's passage is an exact harmonic match to Pachelbel's, the latter two both deviating in the last bar, and may in fact have arisen more prosaically from one of the more obvious harmonizations of a descending major scale. This sequence is known as a plagal sequence.
In Germany, Italy, and France of the 17th century, some pieces built on ground bass were called chaconnes or passacaglias; such ground-bass works sometimes incorporate some form of variation in the upper voices. While some writers consider each of the 28 statements of the ground bass a separate variation, one scholar finds that Pachelbel's canon is constructed of just 12 variations, each four bars long, and describes them as follows:
- quarter notes
- eighth notes
- sixteenth notes
- leaping quarter notes, rest
- 32nd-note pattern on scalar melody
- staccato, eighth notes and rests
- sixteenth note extensions of melody with upper neighbor notes
- repetitive sixteenth note patterns
- dotted rhythms
- dotted rhythms and 16th-note patterns on upper neighbor notes
- syncopated quarter and eighth notes rhythm
- eighth-note octave leaps
Pachelbel's Canon thus merges a strict polyphonic form (the canon) and a variation form (the chaconne, which itself is a mixture of ground bass composition and variations). Pachelbel skillfully constructs the variations to make them both pleasing and subtly undetectable.
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