Round (music)

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.

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When the voices enter at different pitches, the composition is a canon, and still more complicated pieces are fugues.

Related Topics:
Canon - Fugue

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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:

Related Topics:
Sumer Is Icumen In - Thomas Ravenscroft

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:Three Blinde Mice,

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:three Blinde Mice,

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:Dame Iulian,

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:Dame Iulian,

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:The Miller and his merry olde Wife,

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:shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife.

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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. Rounds were often called catches in that time.

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