Bob Bielefeld's


Songbook of Renaissance Festival Favorites

"This book is a compilation of songs, dance music and instrumental pieces of earlier times. These tunes are finding a renewed popularity with modern musicians and audiences at Renaissance Festivals, Medieval Faires, Shakespearian productions and other similar venues.

'Where did you get your music?' is a question often heard by Renaissance Festival musicians. Cantiga's repertoire and performing style are a combination of many factors. Within any band, each musician brings their own sources and forces. We learn tunes from our fellow Renaissance Festival performers; from recordings, published anthologies, the archives of music libraries, even from movie soundtracks and commercial jingles; and sometimes a new tune is composed just to complement a particular event or scene at the Faire.

For several decades, Renaissance Festivals have been a gathering of artisans, musicians, actors and variety performers drawing from a colorful palette of styles and backgrounds. While performing in a style that reflects the historical theme, festival performers also draw on more familiar forms to entertain modern audiences. Forms of folk art are evolving that mirror the spirit of the Renaissance period. New styles of music are emerging; a sort of Medieval / Renaissance / Celtic /American 'folk fusion.'

CANTIGA has been performing music at Renaissance Festivals for more than twenty years. We have tried to create a book that will be useful to our fellow musicians. The titles are presented alphabetically to make the music easy to find. Each tune is accompanied by text to suggest ideas for performance, place the music in a modern festival context and provide useful information to those interested in studying historical sources of early music. You can hear our arrangements of some of the tunes presented in this book on our companion recording [included with the book]. Finally, we have chosen compelling melodies, the kind that will stick in your mind and you'll find yourself whistling or humming."

"...The tunes are presented here in simple 'lead sheet' form, i.e. melody line with accompanying chord symbols." [a total of 143 tunes, 113 of which are instrumental, along with 30 presented with the lyrics]