Johann Pachelbel (born 1653, died 1706) lived his entire life before the U.S.A. even became a nation. (George Washington wasn’t even born until 1732, 26 years after Pachelbel’s death.) Yet his most well-known piece, Canon in D, has became a staple of American television, movies, advertising and, of course, MTV.
Pachelbel was a alive around the time of Johann Sebastion Bach (1685-1750). He was a friend of the Bach family and even was a Godfather to one of the Bach children. In fact, he was always hanging around the Bach household–they couldn’t get rid of the guy! Anyway, Pachelbel was a master of the organ and composed numerous works, especially for the organ.
But unlike J.S. Bach with numerous top ten hits, Johann Pachelbel had only a single hit that made it to #1 on the Baroque charts. His big number is Canon in D from around 1680. So Pachelbel is more like Mungo Jerry (”In The Summertime” in 1970) or Los Del Rio (”Macarena” around 1995) than one of the old masters like Bach or Hayden.
It turns out Canon in D was the only canon he ever wrote. So maybe he should have gone with his strength and written a few more canons instead of screwing around writing Chorales, which constitute about half of his works.
The harmonic structure of Canon in D is built on an 8-chord progression that repeats throughout the work. In classical music, a repeating pattern like that is called ostinato. A blues musician might call it a riff. The progression is D A Bm F#m G D G A. Listen to Canon in D now and you will be sure to recognize it.
Surprisingly, the chord progression from Canon in D is used in many modern songs in rock, punk and pop music. So Pachelbel’s one-hit lives on centuries later on MTV and in television commercials. Apparently one hit is enough to achieve a kind of immortality. So it’s looking like old Johann Pachelbel is a pretty cool guy after all. After all, how many people can lay claim to writing a musical piece that is still popular 300 years later?
But not everyone is so enamored with old Johann Pachelbel. Here is musician and comedian Rob Paravonian in a bit about how the chord progression from Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D appears in many songs that you might here on MTV, which just about drives him nuts.
