Defending Pachelbel[?]

The "Pachelbel Rant" is making the rounds on YouTube.

It's a pretty easy position within the classical music world to dump on the canon in D. (The matching gigue somehow gets off scot-free.) It's perhaps the poster-piece for everything that's wrong with classical music programming on radio -- always headlining collections of "relaxing" classical music, as if one of the great art forms was actually meant as a lobotomy rather than intellectual stimulation. But is that Pachelbel's fault?

So, then, what about the music? It's both a basso-ostinato and a three-part canon. While this may be considered a strength, I actually think it hurts the piece a little. My recollection is that it is neither all that strong as a canon or as an ostinato. When I think of great baroque ostinato pieces, what comes to mind are Bach's c-minor passacaglia and d-minor chaconne. Each creates the illusion of ternary form and finds ways to integrate each phrase into the next. Pachelbel doesn't; he has an endless series of indepedent four-bar phrases. (I once heard a "rearrangement" by Prof. Robert Greenberg, which changed the order of the phrases, and it was just as seemless as the original.) If you're interested in form rather than straight episodic writing, this is a huge strike against it.

How is it as a canon? It's fairly straight-forward. It does the job fairly elegantly, but doesn't really pose a big challenge. After you've heard Bach's "A Musical Offering," I think it's hard to get excited about the Pachelbel.

So, my conclusion is that this canon has two problems, neither of which is strictly Pachelbel's fault: it is over-exposed, and it wasn't written by Bach. It's possible to imagine a world where the same piece of music might be considered an early-music gem, but it's not the lot it drew.