A round is a musical composition, a limited type of canon, in which a minimum of three voices sing exactly the same melody at the unison, but with each voice beginning at different times so that different parts of the melody coincide in the different voices, but nevertheless fit harmoniously together. It is one of the easiest forms of part singing, as only one line of melody need be learned by all parts, and is part of a popular musical tradition. They were particularly favoured in glee clubs, which combined amateur singing with regular drinking. The earliest known rounds date from 12th century Europe. "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" is a well-known children's round for four voices. Other well-known examples are "Frère Jacques", "Three Blind Mice", and, more recently, "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys . A catch is a round in which a phrase that is not apparent in a single line of lyrics emerges when the lyrics are split between the different voices. "Perpetual canon" refers to the end of the melody leading back to the beginning, allowing easy and immediate repetition. Often, "the final cadence is the same as the first measure".
History
The term "round" first appears in English in the early 16th century, though the form was found much earlier. In medieval England, they were called rota or rondellus. Later, an alternative term was "roundel". Special types of rounds are the "catch", and a specialized use of the word "canon", in 17th- and 18th-century England designating rounds with religious texts. The oldest surviving round in English is "Sumer Is Icumen In" , which is for four voices, plus two bass voices singing a ground, also in canon. However, the earliest known rounds are two works with Latin texts found in the eleventh fascicle of the Notre Dame manuscript Pluteo 29.1. They are Leto leta concio and O quanto consilio. The former dates from before 1180 and may be of German origin. 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:
Mechanics
What makes a round work is that after the work is divided into equal-sized blocks of a few measures each, corresponding notes in each block either are the same, or are different notes in the same chord. This is easiest with one chord, as in "Row, Row, Row Your Boat": A new part can join the singing by starting at the beginning whenever another part reaches any asterisk in the above music. If one ignores the sixteenth notes that pass between the main chords, every single note is in the tonic triad—in this case, a C, E, or G. Many rounds involve more than one chord, as in "Frère Jacques" : The texture is simpler, but it uses a few more notes; this can perhaps be more easily seen if all four parts are run together into the same two measures: The second beat of each measure does not sketch out a tonic triad, it outlines a dominant seventh chord.
