showing the successive combinations of voices that occur when four “companions” sing the round as
prescribed by the rubric (Ex. 11-1). Harrison, interestingly and uniquely, claimed that the Latin version of
the canon was the original one, pointing out that the first five notes of the pes coincides with the incipit of
Regina coeli, laetare, the Marian antiphon sung at Eastertide (compare Ex. 3-12a).^1 Whether to regard the
undeniable resemblance as design or happenstance is anyone’s guess.
Printed like this, as a twelve-part array, the Sumer canon looks very impressive indeed, and it is not
difficult to see why it has been a celebrity of music history ever since there has been such a thing as music
history. A certain nationalistic, promotional fervor has undoubtedly also played a part in the process of
disseminating it. The canon has been a national monument in England since the days of Hawkins and
Burney. It was printed as the frontispiece to the “S” volume in several editions of the big Grove
Dictionary of Music, and even in the latest edition (the seventh, published in 2001) it has its own title
entry, with a column and a half of text and a full-page photographic facsimile of the source. Every English
school anthology (whether of songs or of poems) used to contain it, and every English child at school used
to be able to sing it by heart. A book the present author was given as a child called it “the first
masterpiece of music.” Needless to add, it spawned legions of parodies, the most famous being Ezra
Pound’s “Winter is icumen in, lhude sing goddamn!” But just what has made it such a hit? Its “bigness,” if
we allow ourselves a moment to reflect, is somewhat illusory. A lot of parts get going at once, to be sure,
but they are organized according to a very simple pattern, the repetitive pes with its implied harmonic
oscillation between the final (F) and its “supertonic” (G)—the very oscillation that has governed the tonal
design of many genres that we have already encountered, including all that have “open/shut” cadences or
endings.
In fact, that oscillation has in a very significant way become more literally harmonic, as we
understand the term today, than any music we have hitherto encountered. Once the second voice has
entered, full F major and G minor triads sound on practically every beat. And that evocative alternation
has meant “olde England,” if not since the thirteenth century, at least since the time of Burney and
Hawkins. Benjamin Britten (1913–76) was only the most conspicuous of many modern English composers
when he appropriated it (tastefully embellished with a tonic pedal) to set the scene at the beginning of his
popular Ceremony of Carols, a Christmas school-piece for children’s voices that he wrote in 1942. The
“summer” progression, played on the harp, is actually the first harmony one hears, preceded only by a
monophonic mock-Gregorian processional. (In Ex. 11-2 the music is transposed from A major to F major
to aid comparison with Ex. 11-1.)
EX. 11-1 Sumer Canon, as realized by Frank Llewellyn Harrison