The Visual Culture of Rounds, Catches, and Canons in Early Modern England

Rounds, catches and canons occupy an intriguing place in early modern culture. At a popular level they circulated predominantly orally, and in many cases were more straightforward and easier to learn by hearing than to record or read in notation. However, rounds, catches and canons were also created by professional musicians and increasingly enjoyed by higher class amateurs (who were increasingly likely to be musically literate as the sixteenth century progressed) in contexts where rounds and canons were both seen and heard. More so than other forms of musical notation, rounds or canons slip between the visual and the musical, to be pictorial as well as notational. This is most obvious when rounds were represented in circular form representative of their potential unending song, but even when notated more straightforwardly, these short musical forms were often combined with other visual or textual media for their emblematic properties as much as their musical ones. Moreover, wherever they were used, the notated round or canon brought new performative, kinetic, and social dimensions— and by extension enriched hermeneutic potential—to the visual or textual object it adorned. This chapter analyses examples of visually creative uses of rounds and canons in print and manuscript from mid-to-late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England to explore how users might have interacted with these musico-visual artefacts, how these interactions generated meaning, and what this might reveal early modern conceptions of musical form, especially among recreational, musically literate musicians. These intermedial designs reveal the agility of early modern people to translate and synthesise meaning across artforms, perceiving music as both visual form and sonic act, as shape and as motion, and finding meaning in that fluidity.