In the 1440s, Martin le Franc credited Guillaume Dufay with a revolutionary and fresh musical sensibility; this judgement laid the foundation for viewing Dufay as musical father of the Renaissance. A more skeptical historiography views Dufay's achievement more in terms of invention than of innovation; his utter command of musical techniques over a varied and prolific career remains. He assimilated various musical forms, sacred and secular, and an international array of styles from Loqueville, Dunstable, Ciconia, and others; he left some 200 compositions and a long shadow of influence upon his contemporaries. His late cyclic Masses prepared for the Josquin/Obrecht generation.

The Northerner Dufay composed chansons throughout his life, though perhaps two-thirds of them were written before ca. 1440. He favored the Rondeau form, though Ballades serve occasions such as a 1423 Savoyard state wedding. The earlier songs are based on an essential Cantus-Tenor duet, with Contratenor filling and supporting the harmonic framework. Though each piece is individual, they share a consistently graceful melodic craft; brief untexted introductions and phrasal interludes are common. A later group of songs (including his few Bergerettes), generally displaying greater economy of melodic means, probably dates from his 1450s tenure at the Savoy court.

The grander occasions of State warranted Dufay's isorhythmic motets. These generally adopt the rational structure of a rhythmically manipulated Tenor cantus firmus, and the Gothic complexity of polytextual upper voices. But Dufay's motets surpass in scope and technical proficiency his predecessors'. Supremum est mortalibus, for instance, though in three voices, presents an elegant variety of textures, including Fauxbourdon. Ecclesie militantis (five voices) contains three canti firmi, two of which paraphrase different plainchants for the Angel Gabriel (both pieces were written for Pope Eugenius IV, Gabriele Condulmer). The famed motet for the dedication of Florence Cathedral, Nuper rosarum flores, places two isomelic (melodically unified) upper voices over a pair of tenors whose proportional scheme reflects the architecture of the Cathedral itself.

Almost lifelong employment in the Church evoked from Dufay a wide spectrum of liturgical compositions. Among them are three-voiced chant-based Antiphons, Magnificats, Sequences, and an influential cycle of Hymn settings covering the entire liturgical year. Many of these pieces are linked to English discant and Continental improvisatory practice; the chant is slightly ornamented in the uppermost voice (again foregrounding his elegant melodies). A vast group of Mass Proper settings preserved in Trento have been attributed to Dufay; an entire Marian Office in new plainchant, commissioned from him by Cambrai, was discovered in 1985. The four late Masses, with the new English technique of unification around a single preexistent cantus firmus, crown his compositional career. Each of these four-voiced Masses is apparently conceived as a self-sufficient "masterwork." The prodigious L'Homme armé Mass contains a "crab" canon at its climax; the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini juxtaposes two similar chants simultaneously throughout. The Missa Ave regina coelorum, on his own Marian antiphon, may have solemnized the 1472 dedication of Cambrai Cathedral; Dufay's will stipulated it be sung at his deathbed.

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