Canon in D, by Pachelbel
Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep. Open it in the browser and it plays, at whatever tempo you can read it.
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How to learn Canon in D
- Hear it through at Slow (40 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in D major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: Dmaj7, D6, Gmaj7 and A7. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 40 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (60 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 3 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
Johann Pachelbel wrote his Canon around 1700 for three violins over a repeating bass line, and it was almost forgotten until a recording in 1968 made it one of the most played pieces in the world, above all at weddings. The bass plays the same eight notes over and over, and over it the melody grows from slow notes into faster and faster patterns, each violin entering two bars after the last. This is a piano arrangement: the bass in the left hand, the canon above it in the right.
How to play it
The left hand is the foundation and must never change speed, so learn its eight-note pattern first until it runs by itself. Then add the right hand one variation at a time, and keep the faster runs light so the bass can still be heard underneath.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
More free Pachelbel sheet music
Where else this one is listed
The same piece, in the lists people search for.
Who Pachelbel was
German organist of the generation before Bach, respected in his lifetime as a teacher and church musician in Nuremberg, and known today for a single piece he would have thought one of his least important. The Canon in D sat unplayed for nearly three centuries until a 1968 recording turned it into the most performed piece of Baroque music on earth, at weddings, in adverts, and under a thousand pop songs that borrow its chords. He taught Johann Christoph Bach, who taught his younger brother Johann Sebastian, so the line to the Well-Tempered Clavier runs through him.
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including D major.