Guillaume Dufay

Guillaume Dufay (c. 1397-1474) was a Franco-Flemish composer whose works defined the leading edge of European music in the early Renaissance. The illegitimate son of an unknown priest and a woman from the diocese of Cambrai, he was placed as a choirboy at Cambrai Cathedral around 1409 and trained there in the elaborate polyphonic style of the late Burgundian school.

From the 1420s he traveled widely on church and court appointments, serving the Malatesta family in Rimini and Pesaro, the chapel of Pope Eugene IV in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, and the Duke of Savoy in Chambery. He returned periodically to Cambrai, where he held a canonry from 1436 and spent his last years as the city's leading musician.

His surviving output runs to roughly two hundred works and covers nearly every genre of his time. The cyclic mass settings, including the Missa Se la face ay pale built on his own chanson tenor and the Missa L'homme arme, helped establish the unified polyphonic Mass as the central form of sacred music. His motet Nuper rosarum flores, written for the consecration of Brunelleschi's dome at the Florence Cathedral in 1436, remains among the most discussed works of the century.

He also composed dozens of French and Italian chansons, secular pieces in fixed forms such as the rondeau and the ballade that circulated in manuscripts throughout western Europe and influenced the next generation, including Ockeghem and Busnois.

The given name Guillaume is the French form of the Germanic name Wilhelm, from willo, will, and helm, helmet or protection. He carried it across the courts and chapels of fifteenth-century Europe.