The Authentic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Performance Based on the Original Manuscript & Played with Original 17th-Century Instruments

Even if we don’t know its name, we’ve all heard Johann Pachel­bel’s Canon in D, bet­ter known sim­ply as Pachel­bel’s Canon — and prob­a­bly more than once at a wed­ding. But though Pachel­bel com­posed the piece in the late 17th or ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry, it has­n’t enjoyed a con­sis­tent pres­ence in the world of music: the ear­li­est man­u­scripts we know date from the 19th cen­tu­ry, and its lat­est peri­od of pop­u­lar­i­ty began just over fifty years ago, with an arrange­ment and record­ing by the Jean-François Pail­lard cham­ber orches­tra.

And so, no mat­ter how many times we’ve heard Pachel­bel’s Canon, and no mat­ter how many ver­sions we’ve heard, we might well ask our­selves: have we real­ly heard Pachel­bel’s Canon? In the video above, San Fran­cis­co ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music — here Kather­ine Kyme, Car­la Moore, and Cyn­thia Freivo­gel on vio­lin, Tanya Tomkins on cel­lo, Han­neke van Proos­dij on baroque organ, and David Tayler on the the­o­r­bo — per­form what many enthu­si­asts would con­sid­er a defin­i­tive Pachel­bel’s Canon. Not only do they play that ear­li­est of its known man­u­scripts, they play it using instru­ments from the time of Pachel­bel, and with the kind of play­ing tech­niques pop­u­lar back then.

“The string instru­ments are not only baroque, but they are in baroque set­up,” notes the video’s descrip­tion. “This means that the strings, fin­ger­board, bridge and oth­er parts of the vio­lin appear just as they did in Pachel­bel’s time.” The video shows that “no met­al hard­ware such as chin­rests, clamps or fine tuners are used on the vio­lins, allow­ing the vio­lins to vibrate freely.” As for the organ, it’s “made entire­ly of wood, based on Ger­man baroque instru­ments, and the pipes are voiced to pro­vide a smooth accom­pa­ni­ment to the strings, instead of a more solois­tic sound.”

Just as van Proos­di­j’s tech­nique might look slight­ly unfa­mil­iar to a mod­ern organ­ist, so might Kyme, Moore and Freivo­gel’s to a mod­ern vio­lin­ist: “All three are play­ing baroque vio­lins with baroque bows, yet each per­son has her own dis­tinct sound and bow­ing style — each bow has a dif­fer­ent shape and bal­ance.” Their play­ing dif­fers in the way, the notes add, that musi­cians’ play­ing appears to dif­fer in paint­ings from the 17th cen­tu­ry, a time when “indi­vid­u­al­i­ty of sound and tech­nique was high­ly val­ued,” and none of it was over­seen by that most 19th-cen­tu­ry of musi­cal fig­ures, the con­duc­tor. How many his­tor­i­cal­ly-aware brides and grooms — with the means, of course, to hire not­ed ear­ly-music ensem­bles — will it take to bring those val­ues back into the main­stream?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Sounds of the Actu­al Instru­ments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Han­del Orig­i­nal­ly Com­posed Their Music

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepi­ano, the Instru­ment That Most Authen­ti­cal­ly Cap­tures the Sound of His Music

How the Clavi­chord & Harp­si­chord Became the Mod­ern Piano: The Evo­lu­tion of Key­board Instru­ments, Explained

Mashup Weaves Togeth­er 57 Famous Clas­si­cal Pieces by 33 Com­posers: From Bach to Wag­n­er

Pachelbel’s Music Box Canon

Pachelbel’s Chick­en: Your Favorite Clas­si­cal Pieces Played Mas­ter­ful­ly on a Rub­ber Chick­en

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.