Canon In D

While Pachelbel was highly accomplished as a composer of organ works and Lutheran church music, his Canon in D has long been one of his most celebrated compositions. It combines two time-honored compositional devices. The first of these is of course the canon, a procedure whereby a melody in one part is strictly imitated by one or more other parts. The second device involves a short bass line (refeered to as a ground bass) that is repeated constandly, over which the composer writes continuous variations. In its original form, the work consists of an initial statement of an eight note ground bass, followed by 27 variations in strict canonic style for three violins above that bass. In addition to these four essential parts, an appropriate harmonic background would have been improvised on harpsichord, lute or organ.