Imitation, Canon and Fugue
One tune, entering several times, at different moments. That single idea covers the round you sang at school and the fugue that closes a Bach cycle. What changes between them is how strictly the copies follow and how much freedom the composer keeps.
- 1 tune
- 2 or more entries
- strict to free
In which styles
- Classical
- Choral music
- Film music
- Prog
- Game music
In short
Imitation works because the listener already knows the tune when the second voice starts it. That recognition frees your ear to follow both lines at once, which is otherwise very hard. A round is the strictest form: exact copies at the same pitch. A canon can transpose, invert or stretch the copy. A fugue keeps the idea but abandons strictness after the entries, which is what gives it room to develop.
Ingenious and slightly uncanny. Imitative music sounds like a single idea being examined from several sides at once, and the pleasure is partly puzzle and partly beauty.
Where it sits in the phrase
The entries come first, always. A fugue opens with them because the listener needs the subject before anything can be done to it. After that the piece alternates between episodes, where the subject is absent, and new entries, which read as arrivals.
Where you run into this
- A round, where everyone sings the same thing a bar apart
- A canon, where the second voice copies at a different pitch
- A fugue, where the entries stop being strict once everyone has arrived
The types side by side
Round, canon and fugue lined up: the round is exact and endless, the canon exact and finite, the fugue strict at the start and free afterwards. There are also the party tricks, which are genuinely used: a canon by inversion turns the copy upside down, one by augmentation plays it at half speed. Hearing them next to each other shows they are variations of one device, not three subjects.
Keep going
Everything in harmony
- Four-Part Chorale Style
- Species Counterpoint
- Imitation, Canon and Fugue
- Counterpoint in Pop
- Jazz Harmony
- Twentieth-Century Techniques