“All excellent and esteemed,” Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Taylor Johnston Early Music Series

The wind players of Piffaro, the world-renowned “pied-pipers of Early Music,” look at one of the most potent examples of musical migration in 16th-century Europe: the story of the Bassano family. An Italian-Jewish family of wind players who moved from Italy to England during the reign of Henry VIII, they pushed instrumental music into a new frontier.

Piffaro delights audiences with beautiful and elegant recreations of wind band works of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Its ever-expanding instrumentation includes shawms, dulcians, sackbuts, recorders, krummhorns, bagpipes, lutes, guitars, and a variety of percussion—all carefully remodeled instruments to reflect their period.

Background about the program and Bassano family.

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