Skip to main content

The Authentic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Performance Based on the Original Manuscript & Played with Original 17th-Century Instruments

Even if we don't know its name, we've all heard Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, better known simply as Pachelbel's Canon — and probably more than once at a wedding. But though Pachelbel composed the piece in the late 17th or early 18th century, it hasn't enjoyed a consistent presence in the world of music: the earliest manuscripts we know date from the 19th century, and its latest period of popularity began just over fifty years ago, with an arrangement and recording by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra.

And so, no matter how many times we've heard Pachelbel's Canon, and no matter how many versions we've heard, we might well ask ourselves: have we really heard Pachelbel's Canon? In the video above, San Francisco early-music ensemble Voices of Music — here Katherine Kyme, Carla Moore, and Cynthia Freivogel on violin, Tanya Tomkins on cello, Hanneke van Proosdij on baroque organ, and David Tayler on the theorbo — perform what many enthusiasts would consider a definitive Pachelbel's Canon. Not only do they play that earliest of its known manuscripts, they play it using instruments from the time of Pachelbel, and with the kind of playing techniques popular back then.

"The string instruments are not only baroque, but they are in baroque setup," notes the video's description. "This means that the strings, fingerboard, bridge and other parts of the violin appear just as they did in Pachelbel's time." The video shows that "no metal hardware such as chinrests, clamps or fine tuners are used on the violins, allowing the violins to vibrate freely." As for the organ, it's "made entirely of wood, based on German baroque instruments, and the pipes are voiced to provide a smooth accompaniment to the strings, instead of a more soloistic sound."

Just as van Proosdij's technique might look slightly unfamiliar to a modern organist, so might Kyme, Moore and Freivogel's to a modern violinist: "All three are playing baroque violins with baroque bows, yet each person has her own distinct sound and bowing style — each bow has a different shape and balance." Their playing differs in the way, the notes add, that musicians' playing appears to differ in paintings from the 17th century, a time when "individuality of sound and technique was highly valued," and none of it was overseen by that most 19th-century of musical figures, the conductor. How many historically-aware brides and grooms — with the means, of course, to hire noted early-music ensembles — will it take to bring those values back into the mainstream?

Related Content:

Hear the Sounds of the Actual Instruments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Handel Originally Composed Their Music

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepiano, the Instrument That Most Authentically Captures the Sound of His Music

How the Clavichord & Harpsichord Became the Modern Piano: The Evolution of Keyboard Instruments, Explained

Mashup Weaves Together 57 Famous Classical Pieces by 33 Composers: From Bach to Wagner

Pachelbel’s Music Box Canon

Pachelbel’s Chicken: Your Favorite Classical Pieces Played Masterfully on a Rubber Chicken

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

The Authentic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Performance Based on the Original Manuscript & Played with Original 17th-Century Instruments is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2LWpxuq
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more