Sounds of Silence: Stravinsky's 'Double Canon'

Abstract

Igor Stravinsky's Double Canon for string quartet was written in 1959, in memory of Raoul Dufy. According to Robert Craft, the music was not intended as a personal tribute to Dufy (the two men had never met), but was originally composed as a duet for flute and clarinet in response to a private request for an autograph (White 1979, p. 510). In spite of its brevity (it lasts about one minute and sixteen seconds), scholars have described it as remarkably strong. Andre Boucourechliev, for example, mentions its 'completely timeless character, which it shares with the Shakespeare Songs. This is due as much to the actual material as to its handling .... Dateless, but timeless too in the sense that it can be endlessly repeated.' (1987, p. 281)l StephenWalsh writes that the piece 'sounds supremely natural; and yet the canons are rigorously strict, and the retrograde forms also reverse the rhythms of the original, a device which, for once, can be heard and is important for the work's expressive effect' (1988, pp.254-5). By the time he wrote this canonic epigram, Stravinsky was working on Movements for piano and orchestra. Having employed dodecaphonic techniques in the great religious works of the 1950s, the composer was already familiar enough with the new method to change and manipulate it in order to find 'new ... serial combinations' (Stravinsky and Craft 1960, p. 106). Indeed, his method of deriving tables of material from the original set by rotating the intervals of its two hexachords separately a method developed in Movements and beyond is well known. The years between 1952 and 1966, during which the composer applied serial techniques, may be subdivided into three shorter periods of four or five years each. The mid1950s saw an exclusive use of complete twelve-note sets and their transpositions. Next, between 1958-9 (Movements) and 1962 (A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer), Stravinsky employed both transpositions and hexachordal rotations to compose his chords and melodies. Lastly, after 1962-3 (from Abraham and Isaac to the Requiem Canticles), the composer made exclusive use of hexachordal rotations: no transpositions of complete twelve-note sets are found. This division of the late period into three is necessarily sketchy and therefore slightly inaccurate because the different techniques overlap. In fact, each newly introduced technique appears to have been introduced into the old technique on a modest scale.2 However, in Double Canon as in Epitaphium, written in the same yearno hexachordal rotations are yet used. In Epitaphium, we only find the original set