Guillaume Dufay (or Du Fay) was born and bred in the north of France near modern Belgium, a region that supplied the whole of Europe with musicians for many generations. For over twenty-five years he worked in Italy, where he came to know artists and thinkers of the Renaissance and (no less important) the princely patrons who supported them. His later years were spent in a glow of celebrity at the important French cathedral of Cambrai.

Dufay’s “Ave maris stella” is a homophonic setting of a Gregorian hymn, one of the most tuneful of plainchant genres. A short tune is sung through many stanzas, followed by an Amen — much like a modern hymn, in fact. One of the loveliest of Gregorian hymns, “Ave maris stella” was also one of the best known, because it was addressed to the Virgin Mary and sung on all of the many special feasts in her honor, and on most Saturdays, too. Note how line 1 contains the words AVE MARI(s stell)A — “hail, Mary.”

“Ave maris stella” is in the D (Dorian) mode. You may be able to hear that the third note in the tune (the sixth note of the scale) is higher than would be normal in the modern minor mode. The hymn itself has six or seven stanzas; Dufay set only the even-numbered ones to his own music, leaving the others to be sung Gregorian-style in alternation. This makes it fairly easy to hear how he embellished the plainchant.

His music for stanzas 2, 4, and 6 is the same each time — almost entirely homophonic and quite suave. The top voice sings a paraphrased, somewhat longer version of the hymn tune, as shown below, where the dashed lines mark the notes taken directly from the chant, shown screened in blue. The embellishment consists of a few extra notes and extensions, with the free rhythm of Gregorian chant channeled into a graceful triple meter.

“Ave maris stella” counts as a rather simple composition for Dufay, whose fame was and is based on longer, more elaborate pieces; he wrote some of the first polyphonic Masses, for example — the important genre we take up next. Still, plainsong harmonizations make up an appreciable proportion of his output, and they show the new Renaissance attitudes with particular clarity.