A Thousand Beautiful and Graceful Inventions

Musicians have always delighted in music that demonstrates ingenuity, grace and skill. Listeners are all familiar with how melodies may be shared, exchanged or tossed around between voices and instruments, from the mighty fugues of Bach to the simple rounds such as Frère Jacques (Are you sleeping) that are so beloved of children and the adults around them.

A common approach running through many centuries of music is the canon – a composition that is based on voices starting one after the other with the same melody and managing to sing the same notes and rhythms but with each voice beginning at different times. Composers exploited the attractiveness and potential of canon in myriad ways: from experimenting with different time distances separating voice entries to manipulating how high or low the first voice’s melody can be in relation to the following voices. Some composers even went so far as to write two or three canons that could be performed at the same time as part of a single composition (the result is called a double or triple canon). All of these techniques have remained staples of a composer’s training even to the present day. Yet, the golden age of canonic composition was the late Middle Ages and Early Modern era. From the early fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, musicians explored canon’s every permutation.

Moreover, they used canons as vehicles for many of the most expressive artistic creations in the entire history of music. Canons formed the bedrock not only of music created for use in church, but they were also used for setting texts of secular, and sometimes quite earthy orientation. The present recording offers a tour of the magnificent world of graceful canonic inventions, from anonymous works only recently rediscovered to masterpieces for large and small combinations of voices that rigorously or playfully apply the musician’s art to texts for prayer, relaxation, and amusement.