A bit OT, but many years ago an ABC presenter, Jaroslav Kovarick, did a late-night program of (I think) two hours consisting purely of different version of the Pachelbel Canon. :-)
On 29 January 2011 13:11, David W. Fenton <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
