settings, was composed for the Burgundian chapel. Louis, duke of Savoy, continued to
woo the composer as well, and during an extended absence from Cambrai, in 1452–58,
Dufay was employed by the Savoy court. It was probably during this last Savoy sojourn
that Dufay composed most of his late songs. By 1458, Dufay had returned to Cambrai
and remained there for the rest of his life, although he maintained contact with several
important patrons, including the dukes of Burgundy and Savoy and, indirectly, with
young Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence.
When Dufay died on November 27, 1474, he left explicit instructions regarding the
music to be sung at his funeral, which was to include his large four-voice setting of the
Marian antiphon Ave regina celorum. His will attests to a man of considerable means—
books, furnishings, property, and money garnered from a lifetime of patronage and
shrewd trading in canonical benefices. There is evidence that both Johannes Ockeghem
and Antoine Busnoys composed déplorations on Dufay’s death, although these works are
now lost.
Dufay composed in virtually every polyphonic form of the 15th century, and it has
recently been discovered that he composed plainchant as well. His works show an
impressive command of every compositional technique available to a 15th-century
musician: fauxbourdon, isorhythmic writing, cantus firmus technique, and imitation.
Dufay’s thirteen, possibly fourteen or fifteen, surviving isorhythmic motets are among
the latest and finest examples of this longstanding compositional tradition. In nearly all
cases, they are works written for a specific event or patron, or may be tied to a period in
Dufay’s career. His earliest isorhythmic motet, Vasilissa ergo gaude, continues the
tradition of Royllart’s Rex Karole (written some forty-five years earlier for Charles V).
The brilliant Ecclesie militantis, a motet written between 1431 and 1433 for Eugenius IV,
is Dufay’s most complex essay in isorhythm, in six sections, with two tenors based on
different chants and three texted upper voices. With Supremum est mortalibus (1433) and
his later isorhythmic motets, Dufay turned toward a simpler style, based upon English
practices, with long upper-voice duets delineating the talea structure.
The majority of Dufay’s surviving works are sacred: perhaps thirty or more settings of
the complete Mass Ordinary, combined Ordinary and Proper, or Proper; nearly forty
additional Mass movements; and nearly fifty settings of hymns, Magnificats, and
antiphons for the Office and Marian antiphons. During the 1440s, Dufay conceived at
least two large cycles of Proper settings, a series of Masses to various martyrs for
Cambrai, and a cycle of votive Masses, probably for the Burgundian Order of the Golden
Fleece. In the Missa Se la face ay pale and Missa L’homme armé, possibly written in the
1450s for the Savoy court, Dufay used secular tenors as a unifying device. His latest
Mass, the Missa Ave regina celorum, was written in 1472 for the dedication of Cambrai
cathedral. Dufay foreshadows later practices in Mass composition by quoting and
reworking polyphonic material from his own motet Ave regina celorum and his Missa
Ecce ancilla.
In his Office music and nonliturgical Latin works, Dufay sets the chant usually in the
uppermost voice, often paraphrased, transforming it into a flowing melody similar to that
of his secular songs. The simplest settings are his Office hymns, set in fauxbourdon.
Some of Dufay’s most expressive writing appears in his settings of Marian anti-phons.
His four-voice Ave regina celorum (ca. 1464), sung at Dufay’s funeral and reworked in
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