Friday, January 2, 2009

A Canon at the Eleventh

I took a look at a well-known counterpoint text, the appropriately-named Counterpoint by Kent Kennan (my copy is pre-ISBN, 1959).  It's one of a large number of such books in my collection.  It has a very useful section on canons that I will probably use several times in the course of this project.

My motivation, this time, was a quote from Kennan in which he says "The 12th is not uncommon as a harmonic interval, but the 11th is seldom encountered." 

By "harmonic interval" he is referring to the distance between the starting pitches of the dux (leader) and the comes (follower).

Well, it may be "seldom encountered" but it certainly isn't any more difficult to write than a canon at the octave, such as the one that I wrote yesterday.  I used essentially the same technique of writing a measure at a time and copying it into the other part. (see yesterday's post) 

Again, I've kept it short, simple and to the point.  



                                                           (click to enlarge)

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