On 28 Jan 2011 at 20:28, John Howell wrote: > It's been speculated--although I can't remember > where I read it--that since Pachelbel knew and > worked with all the hot musicians in Vienna, we > might be completely misinterpreting the Kanon. > It might have been intended for a much faster > tempo, with the violin canon a really challenging > tour de force to show off real virtuosos. I've > never tried it that way, and don't know whether > it would work or not. It would at least make > cello players happier!
There is definitely an erroneous tradition of playing the thing way, way, too slow. The first time I ever worked on arranging it was before the IMSLP existed, and I used a MIDI file to create a Finale file. It ended up with the ground bass notes in WHOLE NOTES. In the original they are QUARTER NOTES. The early music movement has fixed this, I think, and no recent recordings play it as slowly as the old ones did. Of the recordings I examined as part of my blogging project, I derived tempos of between 32 and 72 bpm (based on the length of the recording divided by the number of measures, since not all the recordings play the whole thing). The first recording, the Fiedler 1940, is 70bpm, and it was not until Ton Koopman's 1981 recording that anyone exceeded that (72bpm). To me, it's quite clear that the slower tempos are vastly wrong. On the other hand, the really fast ones don't float my boat, either. I prefer something in the low 60bpm range. -- 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
