A specialist in wind instruments from the Medieval and Renaissance eras, Silke Gwendolyn Schulze takes listeners on a journey into the musical past of the courts and country fairs of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Though little direct evidence has come down to us about individual composers and the instruments they played, she combines painstaking research and a vivid musical imagination to recreate the world of the aristocratic singer–poets and itinerant musicians – the troubadours and minstrels – who were an important part of every facet of cultural life at the time.

Knowledge of these musicians’ social patterns, illustrations of instruments and manuscripts of vocal music and wordless dances have informed Schulze’s reconstruction of the theoretical repertoire of one imaginary Medieval piper – the songs he would have learned, memorised and performed for the entertainment of others.

She performs a varied programme of pieces, some by great names of Medieval music such as Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume de Machaut, some by documented courtly troubadours like Jehan Erart and Guiraut Riquier, some even posited to be by the King of Castile and Leon himself, Alfonso el Sabio, using a wide array of period wind instruments including pipe and tabor, two tabor pipes, pipe and triangle, six‐hole flute, recorder, double recorder, shawm and douçaine.