Canon in D (Piano)

Johann Pachelbel wrote the Canon in D in the late 1600s, and he built it on eight bass notes, D, A, B, F♯, G, D, G, A, which repeat for the length of the piece with everything else stacked on top of them. On the piano that bass belongs to the left hand and never stops, and the right hand takes over what the violins play in the original, one figure after another as each new one arrives.

It sounds calm, and it is quietly one of the best teaching pieces there is, because the same two bars come round so many times that you have to learn how to keep them alive: balance between the hands, a bass that does not wobble, and a right hand that stays expressive while the harmony refuses to change. If repetitive passages usually bore you, this is the piece where you find out how to make repetition into control instead of monotony. Click the sheet music above to play it here.

The bass is D, A, B, F♯, G, D, G, A: two bars, then again, for almost the entire piece. As chords it is D, A, Bm, F♯m, G, D, G, A, the Canon in D chords that half of pop music has borrowed since.

Your job with it is consistency. Same rhythm, same calm tone, no rushing. Practise the left hand alone until it is automatic, close to boring; that is when it is ready. When the bass wobbles, everything above it wobbles with it.

In the original, three violins play the same line two bars apart, and on the piano the right hand ends up playing whichever of them is doing something new. So the right hand has something new every two bars, and the bass under it does not move. The first violin's first entry is eight slow notes, one per bar of the bass: F♯, and then E, D, C♯, B, A, B and C♯. After that the note values shorten step by step, to crotchets, to quavers, to running semiquavers, and eventually to the dotted figures that people hum, with each new variation growing out of the one before.

It is easier to think of them as eight short pieces that happen to share a bass line than as one long one. I would get one variation secure before starting the next, and I would take the semiquaver ones far slower than feels necessary, because at half speed the shape of each bar is obvious and at full speed it is a blur until the hand has learned it.

The bass has to stay in the background while the right hand gets busier, and the only judge of that I trust is a recording, because from the stool the left hand always sounds quieter than it is.

Record one run-through on your phone. You will hear at once whether the bass is too loud or the melody gets buried, and the fix is one dynamic decision. Adjust, play again, listen again. That loop is the ear training.

Because the harmony never changes, the rhythm is doing all of the forward motion, and it shows any weakness quickly. When the pulse sags the piece gets heavy and when it hurries the piece gets nervous, and both happen most often in the semiquaver variations where the hand has the most to do.

Keep a steady beat for as long as you are learning the notes. Once the variations are secure you can let the ends of phrases breathe a little, which in this piece means a small give at the end of each two-bar unit rather than any dramatic stretching of the tempo.

Change the pedal with the chord, once a bar, and never with every note. The harmony moves once a bar and the pedal should move with it; more than that and the texture goes cloudy.

Practise with no pedal at all until the fingers connect the line by themselves, then add it back. Clean sound first. Always.

The left hand is the same two bars for the whole piece, so once you can read D, A, B, F♯, G, D, G, A you have read the entire bass part. The right hand is where the reading happens, and it is patterned too: in the semiquaver variations, each bar is a fragment of the D major scale running through the chord of that bar, so the shape is a chord you know with a scale drawn through it.

Playing sheet music online makes this easier. Loop one variation, slow it down, and read the shape of each bar rather than its sixteen separate notes. Fluency comes from recognising, and this piece has more to recognise than most.

The villain is autopilot. Dozens of repeats of the same bass will put any hand on it, and expression leaves with the attention.

So vary the practice. Play one variation extra softly. Take another slightly faster, once. Keep the brain in the room. Chordzy helps here, in the browser or in the app: click the sheet music and it plays with the notes lit as you reach them, no account required.

After enough of those two-bar loops there is a session where the bass settles, the variations start to glide over it and the hands stop gripping, and the piece changes from a task into something closer to meditation, which is probably why it gets played at so many weddings.

When you get there, click the sheet music and play it through in Chordzy, with the notes checked as you go.