The secular songs of Guillaume Dufay are heard much less often than his sacred choral works, which established procedures (such as the cantus firmus mass) that were followed for much of the rest of the Renaissance era. His songs seem modern at first, with a simple melody-and-accompaniment texture imbued with the sweetness of the so-called contenance angloise, the simplicity and the use of thirds and sixths as consonances pioneered by English medieval composers. In many ways, however, Dufay's songs are medieval. Their texts speak the formalized language of courtly love, and although they treat them freely, they fit into the same formes fixes (fixed forms) as the songs of Machaut from nearly a century earlier. Efforts to express individual passages of text vividly are almost completely absent. This performance by the internationally mixed early music group Teraktys emphasizes these medieval aspects. Soprano
Jill Feldman has a uniquely dispassionate style, with little vibrato; she has specialized in the intricate music of the late fourteenth century in the past, and she gives Dufay's songs some of the intellectual quality possessed by that repertory. Sample her singing to make sure you like it; it's fascinating, but it's not for everybody. There are other ways to sing Dufay's songs, and some of them are more immediately attractive than this one. But the listener can learn a lot about Dufay and his style by hearing the music and taking in the very detailed liner notes of this disc.