Guillaume Dufay:  The Man & His Music
 
 

    Guillaume Dufay was regarded during his lifetime as the premier composer of the 15th century, a title that has stood ever since.  He was one of the foremost representatives of the Burgundian school of composition and his contributions to the development of faux-bourdon and the cyclic mass are of particular interest.  He, however, cannot be considered one of the greatest innovators in the history of Western music.  He gained his fame not from daring novelty, but instead from an incredible understanding of all elements of composition.

Life and times

    Guillaume Dufay was born in or around Cambrai (in northern France) circa 1400 and he died there November 27, 1474.  He spent his youth as a choirboy at the Cambrai Cathedral, where he studied under and was influenced by Nicolas Malin, the magister puerorum of the Cathedral, and his successor Richard Loqueville.  While Dufay never had any formal training, it is believed that he learned the art of composing through performing under these men, copying music for the church, and from varied associations with those older musicians who also knew how to compose.  He remained in Cambrai until shortly before 1420, when he entered the service of the Malatesta family in Pesaro.  He returned to Cambrai in 1426 only to leave again in 1428 to become a singer in the papal choir, one of the most respected musical establishments in Europe, in Rome.  It was during this time that he established himself as one of the most important musicians of his day.  He probably wrote the motet Ecclesie militantia for the consecration of Pope Eugene IV in 1431 and wrote his Supremum est mortalibus for the Peace of Viterbo in 1433.
 
  The ballade C'est bien raison, was written in 1433 for the Marquis of Ferrera, Niccolo III, and is the first documentation of Dufay's contact with the influential and art loving d'Este family (he was probably known in Ferrera through his service with the Malatesta family).  In June of 1435, he traveled to Florence to reclaim his role as a papal singer (Pope Eugene IV had been forced to leave Rome and relocate to Florence).  He remained in Florence until 1436, when the choir moved to Bologna, where Dufay served with the choir until June of 1437.  It was during his stay in Bologna that he received a degree in canon law from the University of Turin.  In 1436 he was made canon of the Cambrai Cathedral.  After again serving in the Savoy court from 1437-39, he returned to Cambrai to shoulder his duties as canon.  In 1446, he was made canon of Ste. Waudru in Mons.  In 1450, he returned to Italy.  He became active once again in Savoy from 1451-58.  In 1458 he returned to Cambrai, where he lived and worked for the rest of his years.

His music
 
    In his lifetime, Dufay wrote seven complete masses, 28 individual Mass movements, 15 settings of chant used in Mass Propers, three Magnificants, two Benidicamus Domino settings, 15 antiphon settings (6 are Marian antiphons), 27 hymns, 22 motets (13 are isorhythmic) and 87 chansons.

   A good example of a typical Dufay motet would be the Ecclesie militantis.  The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes the piece as follows:

    More than half of Dufay's compositions are written in a style that can best be described as chant harmonization.  In this style of composition, one voice, more often than not the cantus, follows the melodic contour, text, and phrasing of a liturgical melody.  The other two voices are fit with the melody in a homorhythmic fashion, usually without text.
 
  Dufay began composing at a time when musical style was in a period of relative stability and changing that style was not readily accepted.  Dufay cannot be thought of as one of the great revolutionaries in Western music; the term 'originality' in the classic sense of the word was not familiar to him.  This is not to say, however, that Dufay was in any way lacking of originality or he was in any way reactionary.  Quite to the contrary, he played an integral role in the development of faux-bourdon and the cyclic mass.  He was one of the first composers to handle four voice texture with any kind of convincing skill before the end of the 15th century.  Furthermore, his attempt to move towards a clearly defined tonal and functional harmonic structure helped prepare one of the most important stylistic developments of the following century.  Dufay's works and compositions have come to be known as the supremely polished works of a long period of slow and serene stylistic change.

Dufay and Faux-bourdon

    Dufay invented faux-bourdon to express, allegorically, Christ's words "You that have followed me" in the Commnuion in his Missa Sancti Jacobi.  Faux-bourdon is "a technique of either improvised singing or shorthand notation", utilized by musicians in the fifteenth century and occuring in manuscripts from about 1425 to 1510.  In its simplest form, a faux-bourdon piece results in a series of parallel sixth chords.  Its style has fittingly been described as "essentially monotonous".

    Of the various aspects by which faux-bourodon can be characterized, the following are essential:  (1)  Faux-bourdon was above all connected to the performance of Gregorian chant.  (2)  It is mostly employed in syllabic chants which were sung with two alternating choirs, or alternatim.  (3)  The technique was primarily a simple procedure to enhance the sonority of liturgical music and did not make any significant demands of the singers' capability.  (4)  The duration of a passage which utilizes faux-bourdon was usually relatively short.  (5)  Its artistic value is measured by the text and the context in which it is used.

    Since the above mentioned statements imply that as a compositional technique, faux-bourdon offered very little possibilty for development and artistic growth, it is difficult to understand why Guillaume Dufay, the foremost composer of his time, appears to have so adored this "essentially monotonous style".  One explanation for Dufay's curious disposition for faux-bourdon may lie in the liturgical nature of the compositions in which this technique was used.  Furthermore, the pieces represent categories of liturgical texts in which fifteenth-century composers displayed much less interest than they did in the Mass cycle and motet.  The answer to the question why Dufay used faux-bourdon so often in settings of hymns may be that he wanted to show his unmatched melodic inventiveness in adapting well-known chants into a style which was so widely dispursed throughout Western Europe.

    Dufay wrote the motet Supremum est mortalibus bonum for the celebration of the first meeting of Pope Eugenius IV and Sigismund, king of Hungary, the German territories, Bohemia, and Lombardy.  Supremum est mortalibus bonum has a strict formal design and unlike the motet Ecclesiae militantis, which Dufay wrote for the coronation of Pope Eugenius IV, it has only one text.  Dufay may have made the decision to use the same text in all voices in order to enable a more effective coordination of music and text.  The complete text of Supremum est is as follows:

Lines 3 to 12 of the poem describe the world of mankind in a time of peace and have a narrative character.  They correspond to the part of a speech which, in rhetoric terminology, is called narratio.  Line 13 opens with an exclamation.  The idea expressed here can best be considered the central purpose of the text, therefore this part of the text should be called the propositio.  With the mention of the names of both of the 'apostles of peace', the peace treaty has its confirmatio, lines 19-20.  The "Amen", finally, is the peroratio.

    In the musical design of the motet, the form of the text can be outlined as follows:

The exordium is used as a free introduction.  Next, we find the first isoperiodic section (bars 11-55) starts and covers only the narratio.  In the second isoperiodic section (bars 56-100), we find the propositio.  For the confirmatio, a new section is introduced.  The same holds true for the peroratoi.  There are several places in the music that illustrate clearly the composer's intention to underline the contents of the text with rhetorical figures.
 


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