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.