Canon – a piece for 5 or more instruments. If you fancy having a go.
Here you will find all the information that you need to perform the canon, including the scores in a number of different keys.
Our version
The whole idea of the canon is to go around the main theme as many times as you like – with whatever instruments you like (so long as they can all play in the same key). But here’s our version. A septet that is made up of 5 melody players and two continuo players (bass and spinet).
Logistics and order:
Stage (16 bars per stage): | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
Instrument | |||||||||||
Guitar (melody)* | A | B | C | D | E | A | B | C | D | E | A |
Nyckelharpa (melody) | A | B | C | D | E | A | B | C | D | E | |
Harmonium (melody)** | A | B | C | D | E | A | B | C | D | ||
Accordion (melody) | A | B | C | D | E | A | B | C | |||
Flute (melody) | A | B | C | D | E | A | B | ||||
Double Bass (bass)*** | Ba | Ba | Ba | Ba | Ba | Ba | |||||
Spinet (continuo) | A | B | C | D | E |
* | Guitar plays melody and the bass line for the first 5 parts; before the double bass took over |
** | Harmonium played unison melody until stage 8, then played melody in RH and chords in LH |
*** | Ba = root of chords. The chords are the same for all stages. |
Range
The melody needs a range of just under two octaves. It can be reduced to just over an octave (1 octave and 2 notes) by moving some of the parts up and down the octave. The idea is, of course, for all instruments to play all the melody parts in sequence, but it works just fine if some instruments stay on the same part – with a bit of planning – making sure that this is compensated by other instruments.
PDF documents
(Click to view)
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