On 28 Jan 2011 at 6:32, Richard Yates wrote: > By analogy, in the 21st century, what is today's equivalent of "Ung > Gay Bergier," i.e. a piece of music decades old that is a favorite for > recasting in new arrangements?
The first thing I thought of Pachelbel's Canon, which has many 21st century arrangements (see YouTube for "canon rock"), while also being old enough to fit the "decades old". As a matter of fact, I think it would be correct to count it as a 20th-century piece because even though it was composed in the late 17th (I have no idea of the exact date), it was unknown until the 20th century. It was first published in 1919, but did not really enter popular imagination until the 1960s/70s (though there is an interesting Athur Fiedler recording from 1940). While most of the recordings were not intended as "arrangements" (though until the early music movement got hold of it in the 80s, there were almost no recordings of it in the original instrumentation, i.e., solo violins and continuo instead of full orchestra), the most famous recording (by Palliard, 1968) was clearly an arrangement (recognizable by the viola pizzicato accompaniment). Also, several of the early recordings made odd cuts, so they weren't the originals, either. But once it became wildly popular (mostly after it was used in the soundtrack to the movie Ordinary People, 1980), it started appearing in both orchestral adaptations and in arrangements for piano and other ensembles. Most recently, i.e., in the 20st century, it has inspired the "canon rock" phenomenon, in which guitarists vie for the most virtuosic variations on parts of the original melody over the original chaconne bass. You can see some of these (many of which are just amazing) on YouTube. And of course, I couldn't fail to mention the great rant from a former cellist about how awful it is to have to play the canon (search YouTube for "pachelbel rant"). Seems to me the Pachelbel Canon pretty much fits the bill, except that it's not a song with words, but an instrumental piece. There's a great album called "Pachelbel's Greatest Hit," which collects together on one album a whole group of different performances/arrangements of the piece: http://goo.gl/8e2sZ => http://www.amazon.com/Pachelbels-Greatest-Hit-Ultimate- Canon/dp/B0000C9JCM/ It doesn't include any of the modern historically-informed performances, but does include the Fiedler 1940 (which is an eye- opener), as well as the second version of the Palliard (it was recorded first in 1968 and again in 1989), along with a number of arrangements for brass and other forces, Rochberg's variations on it, and any number of "meditations" on the canon that aren't, strictly speaking, arrangements of it (so much as they use it for source material). Nor is there any track on that recording that is in the original instrumentation, which seems an odd omission, but that may just be a matter of the early music recordings being new enough that they would have been expensive to miss. Last of all is my incomplete series of blog posts on the Pachelbel Canon are collected here: http://dfenton.com/NoComment/posts/category/music/blogging-pachelbel/ If you want to read one post from that, this is probably the best one: http://dfenton.com/NoComment/posts/category/music/blogging-pachelbel/ One of the key takeaways from that is this paragraph: It occurred to me while listening to those that in popular culture, the piece is a chord progression, not a canon. That is, most of the non-classical arrangements of it completely omit the polyphonic material that makes it a canon, and simply noodle about on the harmonic progression (and many of those ignore the flat 7 secondary dominant that plays such a prominent part at the end of the original, which seems strange to me, given how important the subdominant is in modern popular music). "Canon Rock" actually uses a lot of melodic source material from the original, but treats it as a harmony and melody, with no real canonic treatment. One has to admire these renditions for the players´ phenomenal virtuosity, if for nothing else. As I say elsewhere in the post, it seems that it's not "Pachelbel's Canon" that has been used as the basis for the variations/arrangements, but "Pachelbel's Chaconne," i.e., the chord progression (though often, as I say, along with some of the melodic lines from the canon). And that prompts me to mention the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet's performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yflWG-e38OU ...it begins conventionally, but then goes off in all sorts of wonderful directions. I'd be hard-pressed to even name all the musical styles they traverse! -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
