Adolf Busch did not write his Five Canons in Harmony for concert use, but for home music-making in the true meaning of the word, since he dedicated them to his “dear Hedwig at Christmas 1949.” Busch's second wife played the flute, and it was thus perfectly plausible that she gave the "world premiere" of the canon in a family circle. The instrumental scoring is rich in variants and is thus kept open; just as our scoring can be shaped with great flexibility and a profusion of variants, so does ours allow a random combination of C and B-flat instruments.
