Announcing Canon #78 - “Verdite.” Listen to it here:
Canon 78 continues my exploration of odd time signatures – it’s in 7/8 – and it’s a companion piece to Canon 77 which is in 5/4. Like the earlier piece, Canon 78 is an invertible canon at the second, with a lag of one bar. The imitation is diatonic and the sonority emphasizes thirds and sixths. The piece is mostly in G major with some excursions to C. The melody is conceived with an alternating pattern of subdivisions of each 7/8 measure, going like this: 3+2+2 / 2+2+3 / 3+2+2 / 2+3+3. When such a melody is layered on itself with a skew of one bar, we repeatedly hear 3+2+2 against 2+2+3. At least, we hear a sense of 3+2+2 against 2+2+3; we don’t hear exactly that because the melody has been densely elaborated on top of that metrical framework and does stray from the framework or obscure it at times. The bass is the leader in the first half, and the roles are reversed in the second half. The ethos is sprightly and the texture is saturated. The piece came together pretty quickly, which for me means a few days. As with many canons, it was the cadences that caused me the most questioning. In many of my invertible canons I place a full cadence at the end of the first half and often leave a pause before beginning the inverted section. In this case I wanted to keep the motion going across sections, so I tried the make the cadence at the midpoint less conclusive than I normally would. As for the final cadences, they’re often challenging because, while you can always get the motion to stop, it’s not always apparent how to do that in a short space and do it in a way that’s convincing and satisfying. Here the solution involved bringing the lines quickly through an initial deceptive cadence, moving into an extra bar of free counterpoint which leads to the final cadence. A C# in one place hints at D major, which seems to add some freshness to the final return to G. ■