The Most Beautiful (Non-Religious) Music Ever Written

As an undergrad, I was widely known as the king of hyperbole. I’d regularly use phrases like, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” or “That’s the greatest thing in the entire universe” for relatively commonplace things. But there was one thing I said, though it was sometimes accused of being hyperbole, that was most emphatically not hyperbole: that Pachelbel’s Canon in D is the most beautiful piece of (non-religious) music ever written.

Period. It just plain is. It can be played on piano, guitar, cello,
even the harmonica (my own instrument of choice, though I’m even more inexpert than the player linked), but it was originally written for three violins and it still sounds best that way.

It’s a “canon”; that is, the three violins each play the exact same music, but they play it two bars behind each other, like singing “Row, Row, Row your Boat” in round. And the music of each bar matches so well with the music of every other bar that it mixes incredibly beautifully at all times.

No matter how stressed or worked up I am about anything, listening to this incredibly lovely piece of music calms my mind immediately. It’s like stepping through a beautiful landscape; it’s like being clothed entirely in silk. It’s like an Upstate summer day, or spring in the sunshine after a hard winter. Aristotle and Plato famously argued that music bypasses the rational mind and goes directly to the passions; Pachelbel’s Canon in D does precisely that. It enters into my soul immediately and brings my passions to calm, well-balanced serenity.

And I must say this: I am not a connoisseur of classical music. (Yes, I know that Pachelbel’s Canon is really baroque, not classical, but I’m using the term broadly to mean “anything that’s older than big band,” as the general populace uses it.) Quite the contrary, I’m deplorably ignorant of the subject. I never played a single instrument long enough to play well enough to really perform any serious classical pieces (I continue to work on the harmonica, but I’m still just not very good). Simply by listening I can’t tell my Mozart from my Vivaldi (though Beethoven and later is pretty easily distinguishable). But Pachelbel’s Canon is a work of unique and consummate skill, a masterpiece rarely if ever equaled in any field of endeavor.

As I often also said as an undergrad, and have never stopped saying, there is a special place in hell for people who don’t like Pachelbel’s Canon.

Praise be to Christ the King!