So far, almost all of the documentary evidence we have seen regarding the falsetto voice has been written by non-musicians. We now come to a text which is very different, in that it was written by a singer and composer of the front rank. Though not without its own ambiguities, a careful reading of this document helps us to understand how falsetto might have been used at the start of the Renaissance.

Guillaume Dufay and ‘submissa voce’

Guillaume Dufay was born in or around Cambrai, in northern France, at the end of the fourteenth century, and entered the choir of the town's cathedral in 1409. Ravaged by the French Revolution and two world wars, Cambrai today is an unexceptional northern-French town. But the Cambrai Dufay knew as a boy, and in his last years as a canon of the cathedral, was no mere provincial settlement. In the late Middle Ages it was a major centre in the cloth trade (the town gave its name to cambric) as well as the seat of an archdiocese of immense power. Cambrai's demise is encapsulated in the history of its gothic cathedral, once known as ‘the wonder of the Low Countries’, but secularised during the French Revolution and used as a stone quarry, finally collapsing in 1809. In its medieval heyday, though, Cambrai's fabulous wealth could compare with that of any European city, as could the lavishness of music heard in its cathedral.