Dr. Bob Prescribes Guillaume Du Fay

Yesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the 627th birthday of Guillaume (“William”) Du Fay (1397-1474).  He was, by every measure, one of the greatest composers yet to have lived, and was considered – in his lifetime, by his contemporaries – to be the greatest among them.

Why, then, is he not TODAY a household name?  Why, then, do we not hear his music programmed alongside that of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Greenberg?

You know the answer.  627 years was, in terms of Western music history, a long time ago.  The compositional language has changed profoundly since the fifteenth century, as has the very “nature” of what constitutes musical expression.  Du Fay’s music mirrors a world long gone, a world – socially, politically, and spiritually – that most of us, today, simply cannot identify with.

And yet, his music – no small amount of which is based on complex compositional methods that had been formulated in the fourteenth century – is, to my ear, ineffably beautiful. This is the mark of any great art:  art that transcends the mechanics of its construction and the time of its creation to communicate something intrinsically and aesthetically important over the centuries, to people otherwise unfamiliar with the circumstances of its creation.

Our job – okay, my job – here, today, is to bring Master Du Fay and his world a little closer to ours, and then to recommend two superb albums of his music.…

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