Music for Crumhorns, Volume 2

This music for crumhorns is a massive anthology of Italian, Spanish, French, German and English pieces of many kinds.

This anthology of music suitable for 5 and 6 crumhorns includes music from a wide variety of sixteenth-century sources.  None of the pieces can be shown to be originally intended for crumhorns; the criterion for inclusion is purely that the piece works on those instruments with the minimum of tinkering – alteration of a few isolated notes, and occasional swapping around of parts for odd phrases.  I would expect this collection to be useful also for mixed groups of crumhorns, dulcians, sackbuts, etc.: now that proper crumhorns with real reeds are available, such combinations become possible.  Where parts go beyond the range of crumhorns, alternatives have been supplied in small notes, sometimes, as in the Franck Intrada (no 17, top part) a preferable option would be to have some other instrument on the part in question, here perhaps a mute cornett. And in the two pieces based on a cantus firmus (Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich and Conditor alme siderum) the use of contrasting instruments (or voices) on the melody parts is greatly to be recommended.

On the whole the music has been left intact, but in several cases the exchanging of two parts the second time through a section in the original has been replaced by a single repeated section.