According to Robert Craft, Stravinsky's Double Canon Raoul Dufy in memoriam for string quartet was expanded from a short work for flute and clarinet composed in Venice in 1959. Although brief, it has more contrapuntal activity in its short span than works ten times longer. In addition, it is composed following Schoenberg's 12-tone method, making the counterpoint even more austere and obscure. And yet, somehow, it is profoundly affecting. The counterpoint, although severe, is comprehensible, and it helps to make the emotional content of the music translucent.

Although the work is nominally a funeral monument to the French artist Raoul Dufy, it is not a personal tribute to the man (the composer and the artist had never met). As in Stravinsky's Ode for orchestra (1943) written as an elegy for Natalie Koussevitzky, the conductor's wife, the funereal qualities of the work are impersonal. In works such as the Symphonies of Wind Instruments dedicated to the memory of Claude Debussy (1921) and the later Introitus (T.S. Eliot in memoriam) (1965), Stravinsky had invested his feelings in the music. Nevertheless, the music of the Double Canon still carries a memorial feeling.

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