Meaning of Canon

By | February 13, 2021

It is known by the name of canon to certain precepts, provisions or catalogs. This Latin word of Greek origin usually refers to a model with perfect characteristics (“He acted according to the company’s royalties”) and to periodic obligation payments that tax services or products. To cite a practical example: “The canon promoted by the Spanish government to tax digital products is rejected by a large part of the population.

According to DigoPaul, canon, on the other hand, is a concept with multiple applications within the realm of religion. By canon, for example, it is known the regulation that a council of the Catholic Church establishes in relation to dogma, the catalog of sacred works for Catholic worship, the book that the bishop uses when giving mass and the part of the mass which concludes with the prayer of the Our Father.

The beauty canon, on the other hand, encompasses the features that a society considers attractive, desirable or beautiful. Like fashion, these standards are constantly changing, and they tend to go back to their roots; a style of clothing used in the fifties is considered old until half a century later it re-prevails.

For the law, the canon constitutes the price that must be paid in exchange for the rustic rental of a property and the amount that must be contributed to the State periodically for a certain concession.

Lastly, Canon Inc. is a renowned Japanese company founded in 1933 and specialized in the production of cameras, printers and other technological devices.

Among movie and video game fans, on the other hand, it is very common to hear the term “canonical” to refer to those events that are considered as part of the original story, that respond to the origins of a saga or series of titles, and that they were not included by force, either due to a change in scriptwriters or due to market issues. It refers to a piece of information whose belonging to the universe of a certain work cannot be denied in any way, no matter how excellent the argument used.

The musical canon

In music, by canon is understood the polyphonic composition in which the voices are introduced successively, each one imitating the song that precedes it. The original voice is called a proposal; At a certain number of measures away, the voices known as the response begin.

At the end of the 17th century, the German composer Johan Christoph Pachelbel wrote one of his most memorable works: the Canon in D major for three violins and continuous bass. This piece is very popular in both academic and popular settings, and it undoubtedly contributed significantly to the acceptance of the canon as a type of composition.

Other great composers, such as Haydn and Mozart, have written canons in their works, although Bach took this form to its splendor, which was lost with the arrival of romanticism, where the text and the message became more important than the melodies.

According to the transformations that the voices undergo, several types of canon are distinguished, among which are:

* Circular canon: also called infinity, it is the one where the repetition could never end, given its structure;

* Spiral Canon: in each response, there is a modulation with respect to the previous voice, making its execution very difficult, especially if it is a sung piece;

* Counter motion canon: repetition is the inversion of each interval of the canonical theme, where in general the interval type is maintained diatonically, which does not guarantee that the resulting tonal distance will be the same. A clear example is to take the DO RE line and generate the DO SI canon, where the major second becomes a minor second, since between DO and RE there are two semitones and between DO and SI, only one.

Canon