his Missa Ave regina, uses the chant melody as a cantus firmus and includes emotional
prayers on behalf of the composer himself.
There are over eighty surviving songs by Dufay, composed from ca. 1420 to ca. 1465.
His earliest songs exhibit a great variety of styles, from the virtuosity and notational
complexity of Resvelliés vous (1423) to relatively simple works, such as the rondeau
J’atendray tant. His late songs, such as Adieu m’amour or Par le sregart, products of a
composer in his fifties and sixties, are more sedate than the vivacious songs of the 1420s
and exhibit careful attention to text expression and formal balance.
Dufay and Binchois were acknowledged by their contemporaries as the best song
composers of their generation, but there are striking differences between them.
Binchois’s nearly sixty songs are more or less unified in style, while Dufay’s song style
evolved substantially over his career. As in Binchois’s songs, Dufay’s most frequent
subject is courtly love, but his works exhibit great variety, with texts celebrating May
Day or New Year’s Day (Ce jour le doibt and others), honoring patrons (Resvelliés vous
for Carlo Malatesta), and other subjects. Like those of Binchois, the bulk of Dufay’s texts
are in fixed forms—rondeau, ballade, and (in later works) bergerette—but his songs also
include settings of Latin or Italian poetry, including Petrarch’s Vergene bella.
J.Michael Allsen
[See also: BINCHOIS, GILLES; BRASSART, JOHANNES; CONTENANCE
ANGLOISE; CYCLIC MASS; FAUXBOURDON; ISORHYTHMIC MOTET; PHILIP
THE GOOD]
Dufay, Guillaume. Guillelmi Dufay: opera omnia. 6 vols. (Vol. 1 in two parts), ed. Heinrich
Besseler. Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1951–66.
Atlas, Allan, ed. Papers Read at the Dufay Quincentenary Conference, Brooklyn College,
December 6–7, 1974. New York: Department of Music, School of Performing Arts, Brooklyn
College, 1976.
Fallows, David. Dufay. London: Dent, 1982.
Planchart, Alejandro Enrique. “Guillaume Du Fay’s Benefices and His Relationship to the Court of
Burgundy.” Early Music History 8(1988):117–71.
——. “The Early Career of Guillaume Du Fay.” Journal of the American Musicological Society
46(1993):341–68.
Wright, Craig. “Dufay at Cambrai: Discoveries and Revisions.” Journal of the American
Musicological Society 28(1975): 175–229.
DUKE/DUCHY
. The Latin word dux ‘leader,’ from which the later title “duke” was derived, was first
employed as a formal title in the late 3rd century, when a new type of officer was put in
command of all the forces within districts of the empire composed of one or several
provinces, each of which included several civitates, or city-states. Down to 1344, all later
duces in Gaul would have a comparable sphere of authority. Under the Merovingians, the
ducatus, or ducal office, differed from its Roman predecessor primarily in being irregular
and in having a much higher place in the hierarchy of dignities, immediately below the
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 586