Rethinking Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major

By Benjamin Shute | From the May/June 2026 issue of Strings

I must admit to experiencing a twinge of sadness whenever I hear wedding musicians lament Pachelbel’s Canon as the bane of their existence. Of course, when I hear it played at half-tempo (I’d put my ideal tempo somewhere around 66 bpm), or stripped of any actual canon, or indeed reduced to a chord progression rich in consecutive fifths, I feel warmly invited to join their lamentation. 

The reason this makes me sad is because, to me, Pachelbel’s Canon is the ultimate wedding piece. First of all, how neat is it that it’s essentially a square ciaccona, transforming the exuberant old triple meter dance into a duple meter that dignifies the exuberance with a hint of the stately? (Ex. 1)

Secondly, a very similar ostinato motif in Dietrich Buxtehude’s Praeludium in G minor has been dubbed the “Lübecker Glocken-spiel,” referring to the pealing of church bells. Could Pachelbel have had a similar association in mind? (I do think that someone more handy than myself should construct a set of “Pachelbells” to chime the bass line along with the continuo. Guaranteed unlimited demand, and what could be more festive?) 

But most importantly of all, the piece may have been composed for a wedding, none other than that of J.S. Bach’s elder brother, Johann Christoph, himself a student of Pachelbel. 

But here’s where it gets interesting. Example 2 shows the simplest way to realize harmonies over Pachelbel’s bass. 

Think of the three-voice chords in the treble staff above as creating three lines of music, three melodic avenues through the chord progression. Not many years ago, I noticed that the violin part (played, of course, by all three violins in succession) consists entirely of rotation through these three “avenues,” one after the other (Ex. 3). For the first eight bars, the violin part consists of the topmost line; then, when the bass repeats, it moves to the middle one; after eight bars, it’s an embellished form of the lower one. After that, the violin part simply returns to an embellished form of the top line, then the middle, then the bottom, and so forth until the end of the piece (Ex. 4). 

Put that in the context of historical improvisation over a figured bass, which isn’t so daunting if your improvisation consists simply of repeating a single melodic line over the bass but embellishing it in different ways. What if you have three people who each have their own prescribed melodic scaffolding over the figured bass on which to improvise (say, each person takes one of the three lines from Pachelbel’s progression)? You’ve got entry-level group improvisation. 

Now, what if you live in a culture in which bass progressions like the ciaccona, bergamasca, romanesca, follia, and so forth are musical bread-and-butter, and improvisation is a common pastime? It’s conceivable that following the three melodic pathways through Pachelbel’s progression that I’ve given above would be second nature to reasonably seasoned musicians, and so rotating among them, as Pachelbel does, would be no trouble. In that light, it’s possible to see Pachelbel’s Canon as a template for, and model of, group improvisation. (In fact, it serves this purpose so well that I use it to introduce improvisation, within the safe space of a large group, to second-year students at the University of St. Andrews, none of whom are music majors and many of whom are altogether new to improvisation.) 

Now, of course, there’s the extra flair of its being a canon, which could be the icing on the cake that makes Pachelbel’s Canon feel like a proper piece and not merely an improvisation instruction manual. 

Or . . . going back to the context of the piece: possibly a wedding gift for a Bach family member. Johann Sebastian Bach might be the one we talk most about today, but his extended family was so renowned for music that the name “Bach” was sometimes used in Thuringia as a gen-ericized term for “musician,” just as we might use “Kleenex” to mean “tissue” or “Frisbee” to mean a thrown disc. The extended Bach family was also renowned for its vivacious get-togethers, which included extensive music making, much of it doubtless improvised. 

In the context of a culture in which a progression like Pachelbel’s would be basic musical grammar, and a family of consummate musicians and improvisers who seem to have enjoyed a good time, is it conceivable that, just as we might play a game of telephone today, they might have had a game of musical follow-the-leader, systematically traversing, say, three well-known melodic lines through a commonplace harmonic progression, each person trying to remember how the previous person had embellished their well-worn line, so that they in turn could transmit that embellishment to the person following them? That is, could they at least have attempted group improvisation of something along the lines of Pachelbel’s Canon? It’s pure speculation, of course; but if it is conceivable anywhere, it’s within the Bach family. 

Here’s the point. When Bach was asked to improvise fugues on a given subject for Frederick the Great in 1747, he went home afterward and notated “perfected” versions of his improvisations in the Musical Offering. Could Pachelbel’s (alleged) wedding gift to Johann Christoph Bach similarly be a “perfected” version of something the Bach family was known to engage in? If so, how special that we might be able to participate in a glimpse of that!

Alas, back to those unfortunate situations in which Pachelbel’s Canon is requested to be played at half the appropriate speed. One thing is certain: Under no circumstances should one entertain the positively wicked notion of quietly substituting Purcell’s wonderfully wild and pungent Three Parts Upon a Ground (which is also for three violins and continuo, is in the same key, and has a very similar basso ostinato that actually should move at about half the rate of Pachelbel’s). No, Purcell’s marvelously jarring false relations and general bizarreness would be sure to shock and bewilder anyone expecting yet another soggy Pachelbel Canon. And it is my official position that even so much as musing on that scenario with any sort of dark delight would be indicative of the deepest moral turpitude.