What people don’t generally realise is that the very idea of giving a concert of early music is unauthentic, a falsification of what originally happened. Introductions – either spoken or included in the programme – are invariably informative, witty, and often deliciously obscene as well. Its programmes are planned to run with perfect smoothness, with a precise awareness of what the audience needs to know or hear at any given moment. The Consort’s success does not depend entirely on brilliant performances.

In no time, the Consort was reckoned a front-rank group. His Early Music Consort, formed in 1967, developed out of such friendly music-making with Christopher Hogwood (harpsichord), Oliver Brookes (viol), and James Bowman (counter-tenor), and is a remarkably integrated and polished ensemble. This is an important aspect of Munrow’s approach, something on which his later achievements have depended considerably. Munrow did so, primarily playing with his friends, those with whom it was sheer enjoyment to make music. Dart encouraged him to exploit to the full his potential as a specialist on early woodwind instruments. Returned from South America, Munrow went to Cambridge, where he sang in Jesus College choir, and met Thurston Dart. View image in fullscreen Peter Maxwell Davis (left) with Munrow, August 1974. It is alive and well and flourishing all over the world. Medieval music has never for him been a dead art exhumed by scholars. – but there are now some English ones springing up, like Jim Jones.) The freshness and spontaneity of Munrow’s playing, however, are undoubtedly to some extent a product of hearing such instruments within folk-cultures where the most ancient musical practices survive to this day. (The makers are largely German – like Otto Steinkopf, Rainer, Weber. Most of his collection consists of modern reconstructions based on pictures or other information. Others have been acquired elsewhere in the course of his travels – from tiny villages in Europe to hippie shops in California. Some of Munrow’s many wind-instruments date back to this South American trip. There he came across many of the instruments associated with medieval music in a context where they were still the staple diet of music, were still played with a total lack of inhibition, with a careeningly free sense of improvisation. His first contact with the world of medieval instruments came on leaving school to spend a year teaching in South America.

When his voice broke he sought refuge in playing the recorder and bassoon, though school (King Edward VI Birmingham) provided little incentive to pursue a musical career. He took piano lessons from the age of six and (more important) sang in Birmingham Cathedral Choir, an experience that opened vistas on to music for him. But his musical aspirations did develop early on. Munrow was not born with a sopranino rauschpfeife in his mouth. It is alive and well and flourishing world over.

If you can’t get to one of his lecture recitals, then his exciting new demonstration disc, The Medieval Sound on the Oryx label, will serve the purpose: though seeing him play these colourful instruments inevitably adds further dimension. You have only to attend one of the hundreds of lecture-recitals on early woodwind instruments which Munrow gives up and down the country, and abroad, every year to realise how much his playing has caused such instruments to be taken seriously – to be thought of not merely as musical fossils, but as a range of sonorities that hold unlimited delights for the listener, and which today’s composers can find an invaluable stimulus. Not even Mick Jagger can have such versatile lips. launching off immediately in each case with little or no preparation. But when all’s said and done, how else could one indicate the wizardry with which he will change from shawm to dulcian to cornamuse to gemshorn to rauschpfeife to recorder to crumhorn to kortholt. And it’s true that a keen ear can spot occasional flaws in his articulation or phrasing, especially since his improvised decoration of fast music is sometimes far too ambitious – it can obscure the sense of the melodic line. Virtuoso is an unfortunate and overworked epithet which Munrow would hate to have applied to him. When I first visited him in Stratford a few years back, his collection numbered over 150 instruments, and it has grown since then. Photograph: Tony McGrath/The Observerįor a start, Munrow is a staggering performer on early woodwind instruments of all sizes and descriptions. View image in fullscreen David Munrow, May 1968.

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