Fauxbourdon: A Treat for the Masses

Album: Dufay: Music for St. James the Greater
Track: "Missa Sancti Jacobi: IX. Communio" (Track #9)
Composer: Guillaume Dufay
Instruments: 3 vocals
Musical Form: Mass setting
Year: ~1430

One of the chief challenges of composing polyphonic music in the 15th century, as well in all previous centuries, was satisfying your own artistic needs, while simultaneously satisfying the needs of the church/court for which you were composing. This problem was particularly severe with sacred music, where the church often demanded that the scripture be clearly understandable to churchgoers in hymns and masses. This would limit composers to using parallel and oblique motion for much of the duration of the piece, greatly decreasing its complexity. In modern music, this is somewhat analogous to a songwriter being forced to write simple pop tunes in order to garner attention and raise money for their work.

Perhaps as a response to this limitation, Guillaume Dufay invented a technique called "fauxbourdon," a form of three-part parallel vocal harmony in which the two bottom voices sing at intervals of a perfect fourth and a sixth below the top voice. To imagine how such a harmony would be constructed, think of the notes in a triadic harmony (the example given in the link is from "Twist and Shout"), but adjust the root note up an octave. Here is an example of what it sounds like when used in a piece of religious music (skip to 0:45). The net effect is to give the music a more full (or "tonal") sound than simple homophony, while leaving the lyrics easily understandable.

The first known example of this technique is in the last section (the Communion) of Dufay's "Missa Sancti Jacobi," composed around 1430. The sound is not quite as pleasing as Dunstaple's moving triads, but it serves its purpose. After Dufay's introduction of it in this mass, fauxbourdon would see widespread use in continental polyphony through the end of the 15th century, particularly by Burgundian composers.

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