Canon in D

Johann Pachelbel wrote his canon somewhere around 1700, and almost everything past that sentence is argued about. The date is an estimate, the occasion is unknown, and the only manuscript anyone has is a copy made long after he died. What he actually wrote is a canon for three violins over a bass line, paired with a gigue that nobody ever plays.

Then it sat unheard for two hundred years. It was printed in the early twentieth century and mostly ignored, and its second life started with a 1968 recording by the Jean-Francois Paillard chamber orchestra: slow, warm and heavy on the strings, nothing like the brisk thing a baroque band would play now. That record sold, and kept selling, and by the 1980s the piece was the wedding processional and had turned up in films and pop songs besides.

What everybody recognizes is the bass. Eight chords, D A Bm F sharp m G D G A, and then the same eight again, unchanged from the first bar to the last while the violins get busier and busier above them. That loop is why any pop song built on a descending progression sooner or later gets compared to this piece, fairly or not.

Written out for a mandolin it becomes four entries laid end to end, each moving twice as fast as the one before. The singing line everybody hums comes first, one note per chord, written here as half notes. The job there is keeping sound going for two full beats on an instrument whose notes want to die. Then a pass at two notes per chord, then two at four, the same eight chords underneath the whole way, two to a bar. Nothing goes past the seventh fret and nothing shifts, so the left hand is not where the difficulty is. The right hand is: a long line, no repeats to hide behind, and inside each entry every note the same length.