Waits, Piffari, Stadtpfeiffer

Instrumental Music of the 16th and 17th centuries

In Renaissance times the most famous music groups included waits (musicians who played wind instruments) from Central Europe who brought their instruments and skills to Italy, France and Spain.
Musicians had always been improvising to special cantus firmi as we can see in the sources up to 1600. Professional performers had to be able to add their own improvisations to the handed down material and thus alter the music every time they played it.
Another tradition was to perform vocal music substituting some or even all parts by instruments.
Composers like Johann Herrmann Schein or Michael Praetorius various times request in their books the use of double reed instruments like shawms, bombards and dulcians. Combined with cornets and sackbuts onecan very well imagine how the music of the Renaissance waits must have sounded.
In this programme Capella de la Torre shows the development of instrumental music starting from the tradition of musicians adapting more and more vocal music to their instruments up to one of the earliestoriginally instrumental pieces, the "Sonata a cinque bombardi".