The Canon was written for three violins chasing each other across four voices. This version brings it down to one player and two hands: the right takes the complete melodic line, the left takes the two-bar ground bass. 4:01, with the full piano score on screen, note by note.
That bass line has been borrowed by pop songs for decades
The eight-note bass underneath is a chord progression that later pop songs borrowed wholesale — Green Day's Basket Case and Vitamin C's Graduation (Friends Forever) among the ones you can name.
It is also one of the tunes most often heard at weddings. If this sounds familiar, it is probably not the original you remember but the songs built on its frame.
Two lines left, and the shape of the variations comes clear
The left hand turns the same two bars over and over while the right walks along on top. There is no second or third violin coming up behind, so what you hear is the skeleton of the piece — the same bass line underneath, the notes above dividing finer with each round.
It plays the way it sounds. Nothing here asks anything difficult of you, and finishing one round makes you want another.
Nobody knows when this piece was written
Its full title is Canon and Gigue in D major — there is a gigue after the canon, and almost nobody plays it.
The date is unknown. The autograph is long gone, and the earliest surviving copy is a nineteenth-century one, more than a hundred years after Pachelbel died. The 1694 you often see belongs to the hypothesis that it was written for a friend's wedding; it has never been settled.
Stranger still: hardly anyone heard this piece before the twentieth century. It sat beside Pachelbel's heap of organ chorales until a French ensemble recorded it in 1968 — and from there it became the chord progression behind weddings, advertisements and pop songs.
A bass line of eight notes, repeated twenty-eight times
The bass has only eight notes — D, A, B, F sharp, G, D, G, A — two bars to a turn, twenty-eight turns in the whole piece, never once altered. That is the progression later borrowed by an enormous number of pop songs.
The three violins above play exactly the same melody, each entering two bars after the last: one phrase is still speaking when the next starts it again from the top. That is what the word canon means — not a title, a method.
Over that unchanging bass the melody varies round by round, the notes dividing finer each time: long notes, then eighths, then sixteenths, thirty-seconds at the densest point, then loosening again and settling back into long notes at the end. That is why it seems to fill up and then go quiet — it is not a swell of feeling, it is note density changing.
If the left hand slips, the whole thing goes
The right-hand melody is not the hard part. The left hand is. That bass turns every two bars and has to do it twenty-eight times; let one turn drift and everything above it tilts.
A workable approach is to play the left hand alone until it stops needing your attention, then put the right hand on top.
We rate this 2 out of 5 — the lowest threshold of the four versions.
Other ways to hear it
The same piece exists here in four scorings: this one (solo, beginner), solo advanced (two lines in the right hand, where the chase becomes audible), two pianos (the sound arriving from both sides), and piano four hands (four hands on one instrument, closest to the original's density).
For more of the same shape — something circling underneath while a voice sings above: Bach's Prelude in C, Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1.
About this arrangement
Where it comes from
Mutopia Project, "Canon per 3 Violini e Basso" — originally scored for three violins and basso continuo, four voices in all. Engraved by Michael Fischer v. Mollard from the IMSLP edition in LilyPond, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Why it was arranged this way
Only two of the four voices are kept: the right hand takes the first violin’s complete melodic line, the left hand takes the two-bar ground bass doubled in octaves. Violins two and three are dropped entirely — what that buys is a piece one person can play from beginning to end with two hands.
