What is a Canon?
If you know me, you know that I am enthusiastic about Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer. His music holds a special place in our current age, as it manages to speak broadly to people with varying religious backgrounds with a sense of spiritual immediacy; yet this accessibility combines with a musical austerity, while remaining firmly in a high literary register--tackling, as we might say, the profound. In many ways, Pärt’s music makes the perfect accompaniment to one’s Lenten journey, and the Kanon Pokojanen might be an ultimate example.
Pärt’s Kanon is possibly his most arduous and concentrated work, taking a full choir some 90-100 minutes of focused singing to perform the full work. The text is a special genre of hymnody, the canon, that comes from the late antique period, and which has survived in common use to the present in Easter liturgical settings. Pärt’s work is a setting of the Canon of Repentance to our Lord Jesus Christ, a beautiful text with deeply personal prayers of repentance.
So, in order to understand what is going on this large choral work, we should first look at a canon more generally. What is it? While the best way to learn the canon’s structure would be to simply participate in a sung canon service--these hymns form a self-standing prayer service--but we can also look at the form itself.
The full composition usually has nine main parts called odes, while the second ode is typically omitted, due to the severe nature of the language, which is thought to be more appropriate to monastic use. Each ode is broken into constituent parts: a short irmos (Greek for “link”) that “links” the ode to a biblical canticle:
1. The Canticle of Moses and Miriam (Exodus 15:1-9)
2. Canticle of Moses (usually omitted; Deuteronomy 32:1-43)
3. Canticle of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1-10)
4. Canticle of Habakkuk (Habakkuk 3:2-19)
5. Prayer of Isaiah (Isaiah 26:9-20)
6. Prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2:3-10)
7. Prayer of Azariah (Daniel 3:26-45 in the Septuagint)
8. Song of the Three Holy Children (Daniel 3:52-90
in the Septuagint)
9. The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55)
After the initial irmos, several short stanzas called troparia follow, which in this case speak of repentance and lamentation in a very personal voice. The final troparia is addressed to the Mother of God and is thus called the Theotokion. So, in the course of a canon service, you can see that there are meaningful connections to biblical themes, personal prayers, and recurring patterns, such as the repeating Kyrie eleison responses or the Gloria Patri.
It’s hard to make sense of all this on paper, so, since liturgy is always better “caught than taught,” I will include a sung version of the Canon of Repentance to our Lord Jesus Christ, being sung by two monks in English at the Monastery of All Celtic Saints on the Isle of Mull in Scotland.
Why is such a thing useful for us, beyond explaining a work by an Estonian composer? Well, I think canons fill a unique position in church hymnody, albeit from an Eastern perspective, because they are prayers steeped in biblical imagery, traditional theological concepts, and in a highly personal voice. As Western Christians, we may find the expressivity and exuberance of such prayers to contrast dramatically from the more staid, sober, and communal prayers in our liturgies. The penitential canons make a wonderful addition to one’s Lenten prayers.
Dr Justin Appel, Director of Music
The Canon of repentance to Christ is found in the Horologion and in most Orthodox Prayer Books. This version is recorded at Mull Monastery.