Medieval Music

Gothique were playing at the Globe last night. They play medieval instruments, with music ranging from Sweden down to Morocco and across to Turkey! The main instrument was the oud, "the grand-daddy of the lute", which is still made in the same way as it was a thousand years ago. The chap bought his in Syria.
He was accompanied on the hurdy-gurdy, which is a modern reconstruction of an instrument only seen in illustrations from the Middle Ages - so they knew it was a box with a handle at one end, and keys, but had no real idea of what was inside it. The lady took the lid off to show the way the strings went, and how the keys changed the notes.
In the interval the chap spent some time explaining the tuning of the oud to an interested member of the audience. These are people who are passionate about their music, and want it to be better known.
They explained that, in the 9th century, the important thing for musicians was improvisation - audiences wanted music that was for themselves alone, which had never been heard before - so in the spirit of this, the Globe got its own improvised piece, never heard before and never to be repeated.
In the second half, they played French folk tunes on two different sized bagpipes. The larger one, copied from an illustration in the Canterbury Tales, sounded a bit like modern Scottish bagpipes, but the smaller one had a much more mellow sound. They were made by someone who lives in Scotland, but makes English bagpipes (in the Middle Ages it was the English who were more known for bagpipe playing - the aristocratic instrument for the Scots was the small harp).
One nice thing about the evening was that it was completely acoustic. There was no electronic clutter of mics and speakers and so on - just the instruments and the players and the audience, just as it would have been back through history.