Change & Decay In All Around I See

Friday 28 November 2008, 7:13PM

The rest of Pachelbel’s canon

The base image is J.M.W. Turner's Fishermen at Sea

During an extremely busy week I've been taking refuge, as I often do, in Radio 3's lunchtime programme Composer of the Week. There's an episode each week day, consisting of a bit of narrative about the composer's life and selections from their work.

This week's subject was particularly interesting: the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel, who was working in the latter part of the 17th century. Like most people I suppose, the only thing I knew about Pachelbel was his Canon in D, one of the most beautiful, and arguably the best known, piece in the western classical music tradition. My wife Kate liked it so much she chose it as the processional music for our wedding.

Given the popularity of the Canon it's odd that the rest of Pachelbel's ouevre is so little known. I often have Radio 3 on all day and I have never once heard another piece by him, and I haven't been able to find any other music by him in music stores. So I assumed that the canon must have been a shining exception to an otherwise unremarkable body of work.

But no: it's clear from the programme that he wrote a lot of very fine music that's well worth seeking out. It is elaborate, delicate and meticulously crafted. His work is rooted in a lovely idea: that the intervals of the musical scale reflect the orbits of the planets, a cosmological order designed by God. Canons, fugues and other forms of musical counterpoint attempt to express the heavenly 'music of the spheres'. There was a quote from a work by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi, which inspired Pachelbel and his contemporaries. I half remembered it from the programme and Googled it:

"'Now one will no longer be surprised, that man has formed this most excellent order of notes or steps into the musical system or scale, since one can see that in this matter he acts as nothing but the ape of God the Creator, playing, as it were, a drama about the order of celestial motions."

This lofty conception of music's role inspired the generation that followed Pachelbel, which, unfortunately perhaps for his reputation, included J.S. Bach, who carried it on and brought it to perfection.

Good stuff. Now back to website content management and business proposal documents… the Pachelbel programmes are archived (for seven days) on the Composer of the Week website.