MU71079A:

Advanced Music
Studies

Canon:
creating music, writing
its histories

Dr Berta Joncus
canon as a study
• Why do canons form?
• How do canons form?
• Can canon-formation be justified?

Part 1: Top-down canon formation

Part 2: Bottom-up canon formation
PART 1: TOP-DOWN

“A canon is an idea; a repertory, a

program of action”
Joseph Kerman, “A Few Canonic Variations”, Critical Inquiry 10 no. 1 (1983), 107
[special issue, Canons]; cited in William Weber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’,
Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: OUP, 2001), 336-55
 COMPOSER

PERFORMER

CRITIC

AUDIENCE
Marc Bolan
of T. Rex
performing on it was
ABC's In Concert
(1973) 1977
when
top
releases
were by
…
 Arnold Schoenberg
“Understanding of my music still goes on suffering from the fact that the
musicians do not regard me as a normal, common-[place] or garden[-
variety] composer who expresses his more or less good and new
themes and melodies in a not entirely inadequate musical language—
but as a modern dissonant twelve-note experimenter. But there is
nothing I long for more intensely . . . than to be taken for a better sort of
Tchaikovsky . . . or if anything more, than that people should know my
tunes and whistle them.”

Arnold Schoenberg, Letter to Hans Rosbaud, 12 May 1947

assumptions
• rejection of ‘uncritical’ theories on ultimate causes
or origins
• empiricism (legacy of 18th-century thought) -
experience as the only source of knowledge,
advanced through study
• cognitively meaningful propositions can be verified
or falsified according to evidence
• specialists command skills to observe, analyse and
draw conclusions that illuminate evidence
• rigour guarantees objectivity and reliable
conclusions
assumptions

• autonomous musical work one author’s output

• autonomous musical work is innovative
• autonomous musical work transcends social function
• autonomous musical work self-selecting by virtue of
its superior quality
• autonomous musical work progresses music ‘history’
assumptions
• originality and disregard for commercial success stand
for authenticity
• narrative of history advancing (‘historicism’): ‘great
works’ marks an advancement, as one master builds
on another’s unique genius
• organicism marks sophistication: parts relate to the
whole, single ideas are generative
• creators or specialists command the tools to make or
judge strong art
 th
19 -century assumptions
• Romantic hero, achieves autonomous expression,
rejects consumer-driven engrained practice
• ‘strong music’ (Carl Dahlhaus’s term) challenges,
resists, changes convention
• ‘art for art’s sake’ post-Romantic modernist retreat
into pure form, establishing seemingly object means
to measure sophistication
• ‘music history’ becomes a chronology of pioneering
style innovators
• selection of great works is immutable
 types of canons
• in the Church and in academies, a canon of
abstract music theory
• pedagogical canon: emulation of masters to learn
and renew compositional process; province of
musicians, patrons; enmeshed during 19th
century with public music education and
domestic music-making
• performing canon: in response to public
concerts, ‘ancient music’ championed alongside
novel, framed by ideological concerns;
programming linked to fashion in latest works
Weber’s chronology of canon
• 1570-1700 pedagogical canon
• 1700-1800 performing canon for public audiences of
England and France
• 1800-1870 international canon establishing aesthetic
criteria
• 1870-1945 canonic and contemporary music both
flourished but sense of ‘classics’ prevailed
• 1945- ‘classical music’ belongs to commercial
industry; institutions sponsor contemporary
music/sonic arts
David Bowie interview 1993
Please watch this video and consider how
Bowie’s description of his artistic process
resonates with notions around the
Romanticism’s ‘heroic’ canonic composer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCm
_sonGfk