The third canon or form of canon
that I want to show you here, is actually
from an earlier composer, from
Josquin des Prés, who was a composer
of the French Renaissance. And this is
what is called a prolation canon, that
comes from one of his most famous
compositions "Missa L’homme armé".
This canon you can listen to in
the PowerPoint, again there is a link
to a video, and there are of course
various recordings of this piece that
you can find on any streaming service.
Now, the prolation canon is an example
that kind of binds together Steve Reich
"Piano Phase" and the classical tradition
of canon in the Renaissance, because
it is actually based on a phase process,
a phase shift.
It is basically a melody, again a motif
that is accompanied by one or more
imitations of itself, so like in a canon
with possible transpositions
and inversions, but the characteristic
of the prolation canon is that other
voices go at different speeds. So the
melody or the melodic structure is the
same, but different voices play at
different tempos. And so they create
a phase shift within the composition
that eventually combines and ends up
all together at the end of the piece,
but make use of these intertwined phase
differences to construct the counterpoint
skeleton of the piece.
Again, there is an example of how
to obtain a prolation canon based on the
Josquin des Prés "Missa L’homme armé"
in the notebook associated with this unit.