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Round (music) - Definition and Overview |
| Related Words: Erato, Euterpe, Orpheus, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Arrangement, Babel, Copy, Din, Draft, Edition, Harmonics, Harmony, Hullabaloo, Hymnal, Hymnbook, Libretto |
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A round is a musical composition in which two or more voices sing exactly the same melody, beginning at different times. Row, Row, Row Your Boat is a well known children's round for 4 voices.
When the voices enter at different pitches, the composition is a canon, and still more complicated pieces are fugues.
The oldest surviving canon in English is Sumer Is Icumen In, which is for 4 voices, plus 2 bass voices singing a ground (that is a never changing repeating part). The first published rounds in English were printed by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1609; Three Blind Mice appears in this collection, although in a somewhat different form from today's children's round:
- Three Blinde Mice,
- three Blinde Mice,
- Dame Iulian,
- Dame Iulian,
- The Miller and his merry olde Wife,
- shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife.
Many of the rounds printed by Ravenscroft also appear in a 1580 manuscript (KC 1), and several are mentioned in Shakespeare's plays, so these little ditties seem to have been quite popular.
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