MUSL 242: Guillame Dufay (c. 1400-1474) & the Renaissance


Created by Erica Land on October 10, 1997

Biography


French composer Guillame Dufay was born in or around Cambrai, one of the primary musical centers of the era and a highly significant staging ground for the structural principles of the high Rennaissance. A chorister at Cambrai Cathedral, he was briefly in the service of the Malatesta family in Italy, and after a further period at home, returned to join the papl choir in 1428. He also had involvement with a number of ruling families in Italy, including the d'Estes of Ferrara and the rulers of Savoy, before returning to Cambrai, where he held a position as canon of the cathedral until his death.

Dufay's large musical output contains masterpieces in every genre from cyclic masses to isorhytmic motets, a piece where a specific rhythmic and pitch patterns are repeated throughout the piece, to simply ornamented hymns and dramatic cycles. Acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the leading composer of his day, Dufay held positions in many musical centres of Europe, his compositions were copied and performed wherever polyphony was practised. Other composers of the 15th century were affected to some degree by his work. Dufay represents the generation influenced by the English composer John Dunstable and forming the so-called Burgundian or First Netherlands of composers, flourishing in the territory ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy, but widespread in its own influence as the predominant Renaissance.

Impact on the Renaissance


Dufay's fame is attested by the survival of his compositions in some 70 manuscripts from all countries in which polyphonic music was cultivated- Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Czechoslovakia- copied from the second decade of the 15th century through to the beginning of the 16th century. The Burgundian period produced four principle types of compositions: masses, motets, and secular chansons with French texts. Dufay began composing in a time when musical style was in a period of relative stability. Dufay is widely recognized for his role in the development of Western music. His compositions began an output of new musical techniques. Important new techniques emerge only in his later masses and a few of his last motets; otherwise he was content to create works within the frameworks of style and form that dominated the period. He cannot be thought of as one of the great innovators in the history of music; 'originality' in the Romantic and modern sense of the word was foreign to him. Individual pieces within large groups of works, such as hymn settings or secular works, are very much like one another.

He gained his fame not from bold innovation but rather from his perfect control of all the elements of a composition, his genuis for graceful, memorable, beautifully sculptured melodies, his skill in varying his textures with imitation and canon, and his instinct for pleasing proportions in individual phrases, sections, and entire pieces. This is not to say that Dufay lacked originality or was in any way reactionary. To the contrary, he played an important role in the development of fauxbourdon, a technique in which the middle voice shadows the melody a 4th lower and therefore has no independence, and the cyclic mass. He was one of the first composers to handle four-voice texture with convincing skill, and the movement in many works of his middle years towards clearly defined tonal and functional harmonic writing both anticipated and helped prepare one of the important stylistic developments of the following century.

The most impressive achievement of the 15th century was the development of musically unified settings of the entire Mass Ordinary. The pairing of two sections of the Ordinary with some musical unity was the first step leading to cyclic organization of all sections. Six such pairs by Dufay are known, three Gloria and Credo and three of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei.

The following are links to sites that relate to Guillaume Dufay:
Other links:
MUSL242 Gateway Page
Dr. Cynthia Cyrus's Early Music Links
Blair School of Music
Vanderbilt University
Comments to:erica.r.land@vanderbilt.edu