Guillaume Dufay Overview

Guillaume Dufay was a French composer noted for the graceful and expressive style of his sacred and secular writing, and he is one of the best-known composers from what is commonly known as the Burgundian school. Originally from Cambrai, he did... [more]

Guillaume Dufay was a French composer noted for the graceful and expressive style of his sacred and secular writing, and he is one of the best-known composers from what is commonly known as the Burgundian school. Originally from Cambrai, he did most of his early musical training there. His surviving works include 59 French chansons, 87 motets, 7 Italian chansons, 7 complete masses, and 35 mass sections. Of particular note is his use, and development of, the fauxbourdon, which is a style of composition based on the sonorities of the third and sixth and derived from English descant, an improvisational practice. Other early 15th-century Burgundian and Netherlandish composers, too, embraced this essentially homophonic technique, especially for psalm and hymn settings requiring distinct textual articulation and clear enunciation. One of his more famous ceremonial motets composed for public celebrations is the “Nuper rosarum flores”, written for the dedication of Brunelleschi’s dome for Sta. Maria del Fiore, in Firenze, Italy (1433). Most of Dufay’s chansons use the poetic-musical forms of the ballade, rondeau, and virelai; a few are written in freer form. His extant masses laid the foundation for the rapid musical development of the mass in the second half of the 15th century. The complete mass settings are in four voices and use a cantus firmus placed in the tenor line. Secular songs such as L’homme armé ( used by many composers up to Palestrina), his own ballade Se la face ay pale, and sacred melodies such as Ave Regina coelorum are examples of the canti firmi that he included in his complete mass settings. In his music he created the characteristic style of the Burgundian composers that link late medieval music with the style of later Franco-Flemish composers of the Renaissance. [show less]