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.
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]
