Guillame DuFay and the Chanson

The 15th Century French Chanson

The chanson — literally just “song” in French — was the dominant form of secular vocal music in France and Burgundy throughout the 15th century, and Dufay was its greatest practitioner of the early and middle part of that century. Understanding how the form worked helps enormously in hearing what Dufay is doing.

The Medieval Inheritance: The Forms Fixes

When Dufay began composing, the chanson was still governed by the forms fixes — fixed forms — inherited from the troubadour and trouvère traditions and codified in the 14th century by composers like Guillaume de Machaut. There were three main forms:

The ballade was the most elevated and complex. It had three stanzas, each ending with the same refrain line, with a rhyme scheme and musical structure (AAB) repeated across the stanzas. It was associated with serious, high-style poetry — courtly love, moral reflection, occasional verse for important events. Se la face ay pale is a ballade.

The rondeau was built on a refrain that appeared at the beginning and returned in whole or in part at set points within the poem. Its structure was more compact and circular than the ballade, and by Dufay’s maturity it had become the preferred form — more flexible, more intimate, and better suited to the lyrical style he favored. Many of his most beautiful songs are rondeaux.

The virelai had a different refrain structure again (AbbaA, with the refrain framing each stanza) and tended toward a lighter, more dance-like character. Dufay wrote relatively few virelais compared to the other two forms, but some are among his most charming pieces.

Dufay’s Texture: The Three-Voice Chanson

The standard Dufay chanson is written for three voices, which in his time did not necessarily mean three singers. The conventional understanding is that the top voice — the superius or cantus — carried the text and the main melody and was likely sung. The two lower voices — the tenor and contratenor (or countertenor, a male voice that can sing in the range of a female alto) — may have been played on instruments (lutes, fiddles, wind instruments) rather than sung, though this is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate and modern performance practice varies widely.

What this means in practice is that the melody rides on top of a supporting harmonic and rhythmic foundation provided by the lower voices. The top voice is typically the most florid and expressive, with longer phrases and a wider range. The lower voices move more steadily and provide harmonic clarity. The overall texture is transparent — three lines, each distinct, none of them cluttered.

Dufay’s Melodic Style

This is where Dufay’s genius is most immediately audible. His melodic lines in the chansons are extraordinarily beautiful — long-breathed, gracefully shaped, with a sense of natural rise and fall that feels almost inevitable. He absorbed Italian lyricism during his years in Italy and brought it back north, giving his melodies a warmth and suppleness that his predecessors largely lacked.

His melodies tend to move by step more than by leap, which gives them their singing quality, but the leaps he does use are always carefully placed for expressive effect. He has a particular gift for the phrase ending — the cadence — which he handles with great variety and sophistication, sometimes giving a sense of arrival, sometimes deliberately leaving things open and unresolved.

Harmony and the Third

One of Dufay’s most historically significant contributions was his embrace of the interval of the third as a consonance. Medieval polyphony had treated the third with suspicion — it was considered an imperfect consonance at best — and preferred the open, austere sound of fifths and octaves. English composers, particularly John Dunstaple, had begun exploring the sweeter sound of thirds earlier in the century, and Dufay absorbed this influence deeply.

The result is that Dufay’s chansons sound warmer and fuller than the music of the previous generation. The harmonies feel more like what we recognize as chords — rooted, directional, emotionally expressive — rather than the more linear, interval-by-interval thinking of earlier polyphony. This is one of the reasons his music remains so immediately accessible to modern ears.

The Later Chansons: Moving Beyond the Forms Fixes

By the middle of the 15th century Dufay was beginning to move away from the strict forms fixes toward a freer kind of song, with less rigid formal repetition and more attention to the natural flow and expression of the text. This tendency would accelerate in the generation after him — composers like Ockeghem and then Josquin would eventually dissolve the forms fixes altogether in favor of through-composed or more freely structured songs.

Dufay stands at the hinge of this transition. His earlier chansons are firmly within the forms fixes tradition; his later ones show a growing freedom. In both phases the quality of melodic invention remains extraordinarily high.

For the Choral Programmer

Dufay’s chansons present interesting programming choices. In their original form they are intimate three-voice pieces, likely conceived for one or two singers with instrumental accompaniment — not choral music in the modern sense. But they have been performed in many ways: with all voices sung, with instruments doubling or replacing the lower voices, and occasionally in arrangements for larger forces.

For a choral group interested in exploring this repertoire, the rondeaux tend to be the most approachable — compact, melodically lucid, and emotionally direct. The ballades like Se la face ay pale reward more careful preparation but offer richer musical substance. And a song like Adieu ces bons vins is an almost guaranteed audience pleasure — light, personal, and immediately charming.