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.