Double Canon (Stravinsky)

The Double Canon (Raoul Dufy in Memoriam) is a short composition for string quartet by Igor Stravinsky, composed in 1959. It lasts only about a minute and a quarter in performance.

Although it is a memorial piece for the painter Raoul Dufy, who had died on 23 March 1953, the Double Canon is not a personal tribute, for the two men had never met. The work originated as a duet for flute and clarinet, composed in Venice in September 1959 as a souvenir piece in response to a request for an autograph.^[1] Later expanded for string quartet, it had its first performance at a Stravinsky festival in New York, either on 20 December 1959,^[2] or else on 10 January 1960 in a concert also featuring the premiere of the Movements for piano and orchestra.^[3]

The Double Canon is exceptional in Stravinsky's twelve-tone compositions in that it uses transposed forms of the row. Stravinsky's habitual practice was to use only untransposed row forms.^[4]

The first five notes of Stravinsky's series for the Double Canon are equivalent to the five-note set of In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, and also are closely related to sets used in Agon, Epitaphium, and A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer. It is representative of the earliest phase of Stravinsky's serial practice, when he had not yet developed the technique of hexachordal rotation that characterizes his music written from the Movements onward.^[5][6][7]

Sources

• Douw, André. 1998. "Sounds of Silence: Stravinsky's 'Double Canon'". Music Analysis 17, no. 3 (October): 313–335.
• Mason, Colin. 1960. "Stravinsky's Newest Works". Tempo, new series, nos. 53/54 (Spring–Summer): 2–10, 27.
• Smyth, David. 1999. "Stravinsky's Second Crisis: Reading the Early Serial Sketches". Perspectives of New Music 37, no. 2 (Summer): 117–146.
• Van den Toorn, Pieter C. 1983. "The Music of Igor Stravinsky". Composers of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300026931 (cloth); ISBN 9780300038842 (pbk).
• White, Eric Walter. 1979. Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, second edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-03985-8.

• Straus, Joseph N. (2004). Stravinsky's Late Music. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis 16. Cambridge University Press. pp. 11–18. ISBN 9780521602884.
• Walsh, Stephen. 1988. The Music of Stravinsky. London and New York: Routledge. See esp. pp. 235–238.