Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral
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Piffaro, the Renaissance Band presents “Now is the Month of Maying.”
Piffaro, the Renaissance Band wraps up its home season with an all-instrumental program, “Now is the Month of Maying.” Tickets start at $29; youth & full-time students attend free of charge.
“There is so much springtime music from the Renaissance,” says artistic director Priscilla Herreid. “Imagine living through a cold, dark winter in a time before electric lighting or central heating. Now it’s May and you’re emerging into warm sunlight. You want to celebrate being alive and being together again! You want to dance, maybe have a little wine, listen to birds sing, and strike up a tune yourself!”
This springtime joy is a universal experience, and composers all over Europe were happy to provide the soundtrack. Piffaro will perform French chansons, German lieder, English songs, Italian madrigals, and dances from everywhere. Animal life also stirs in May, and inspired many charming tunes. Some of the most playful are onomatopoetic. Piffaro’s instruments will evoke the calls of geese with krumhorns (double-reed instruments which fans affectionately call “buzzies”), as well as cats, birds, and crickets.
After the concert, audience members will be invited onstage to visit Piffaro’s instrument “zoo.” The band will showcase a variety of historically accurate instruments, including shawms, dulcians, sackbuts, krumhorns, bagpipes, recorders, lutes, and more. This experience provides a rare opportunity to get up close to these carefully reconstructed instruments, which bring the music of the Renaissance to life. Herreid extends an invitation to newcomers: “If you’ve never attended a Renaissance music concert, with real Renaissance instruments, this will be a really fun, approachable introduction.”
Watch Priscilla Herreid perform De Lustelycke Mey by Jacob Van Eyck in Piffaro’s 2020 concert video, The Bells & Whistles of Utrecht: https://youtu.be/kvQO8PRlhco?si=Gifg_Skc61YsQymB
About Piffaro
Piffaro, the Renaissance band has delighted audiences around the world for four decades with highly polished recreations of the rustic music of the peasantry and the elegant sounds of the official wind bands of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. They bring the sounds of the Renaissance to life with their ever-expanding instrumentarium of shawms, dulcians, sackbuts, recorders, krumhorns, bagpipes, lutes, guitars, and a variety of percussion – all careful reconstructions of instruments from the period and the only professional collection of its kind in North America. For more information, visit https://www.piffaro.org/
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