Composition workshop highlight: Riffing on Pachelbel’s Canon

For our Second Sundays workshop, we will often focus on a particular feature of Hyperscore to highlight, but perhaps our favorite way to take advantage of these composition workshops is to challenge ourselves to find different ways we could approach Hyperscore than we are used to. For our September 2024 Second Sundays, we had this in mind when we decided to narrow in on a single melody window, using the Sketch window to layer in the single motif on several harmonic levels. Our motif in mind was an iconic segment of Pachelbel’s Canon, a tune known for its round-like structure of interlocking and repeating melodies.

We started out by roughly transcribing a familiar melodic segment from the famous canon into a Melody window, experimenting and correcting it by ear when we noticed it didn’t sound quite right. Then we proceeded to draw lines in the Sketch window to represent that motif. Viewers will notice that unlike some sketch windows we’ve created, the lines in this one are all very uniform in length, direction, and color. We chose this to emphasize the potential of working with a single motif of the same duration to flesh out an entire composition. We placed these red lines at different vertical positions in the window, which causes the Sketch window to transpose the melody to start on different pitches. In this way we were able to create harmonic form and key changes in our piece. We intentionally did not follow the way that Pachelbel constructed the progression, but experimented to find other ways in which the melody could be juxtaposed against itself.  Here’s what the piece looks like at the end of our workshop:

Now, take a listen to “Canon Fodder”:

Excitingly, due to the lack of a large number of complex motives, this piece came together very quickly but still felt very harmonically and melodically satisfying. This exercise serves as a starting point for encouraging Hyperscore users to start simple and experiment with all the different things you can do with just one or two motives. Delight and surprise yourself with your song-making skills

To see more tips and tricks for composing in Hyperscore, check out our other previous workshop recordings on our YouTube channel, and read more of our workshop highlights here on our website. What excites you about working in Hyperscore, and what would you like to see us highlight next? Let us know and join the conversation by signing up for the workshop series and composing with us!