Mel Bay Medieval and Renaissance Music for Recorder: Bancalari

Excellent music and presentation. Don't think you can find most of this anywhere else.

I don't like any of the tunes in this book. They are easy to play. I just don't care for this type of music.

I am a multi-instrumentalist that specializes in Celtic, Medieval, and Renaissance music. I snagged this book while shopping on Amazon, more as an afterthought than anything else. The music is quite readable, nicely sized. The arrangements are not bad, though nothing special. I feel only lukewarm about the selections included in the book. There are a few must-have songs, most of which I had in other collections, but nothing new or spectacular. The worst thing about this book, honestly, is the binding. It is stiff, and the book won't stay open to the proper page unless I clip the pages to the music stand, and then I must unclip and reclip while flipping pages, a decided distraction during practice sections or when I want to move from one piece to another quickly as part of a medley.If you play soprano recorder and would like some genuine songs to play from this time period, I suppose it would be a good starting place, but if you are looking to expand your repertoire, it's probably not the best book for you.

I play with a small group that plays a little bit of everything. We working looking for older classical pieces, but nothing too serious, and this fit the bill perfectly. Some pieces look deceptively easy, but turn out more difficult, especially played up to tempo. But most of the pieces are accessible to the intermediate musician.

I had this book once before and lost it yrs ago. Glad to see it's still in print and just as much fun as I remembered. Good for solo practice and to incorporate into writing new songs

Definitely not for beginners!

If you can read music, this has a great selection of little tunes. I'm working on sight reading and these are fun to figure out. Nice tunes as well.

My absolute favorite. Love all the songs.

These relatively simple to play melodies make a nice change from a lot of the usual fare but the typesetting is dreadful. The pieces are very spaced out - for example, Ballade in the photo has a needlessly large gap before it and then has its final three bars on the next page. I enjoy playing them but find the way the book has been put together irritating!

I recently decided to rediscover recorder music ( I hadn't taken my old one out of the case for years) - and I wanted some music exciting enough to make re-learning to read more of a pleasure than a chore.I couldn't have wished for better. This has enough of the old favourites (Douce Dame Jolie, Ja nuns hons pris, Tant con je vivrai) mixed with some delicious surprises (I wish I'd known about Paul Peurl twenty years ago).If you need something to motivate you to get better acquainted with your old recorder, this book can do that. If you want an easy way into trouvere or other medieval music, this book can do that. If you just need a new kind of sparkle in your days, this book can do that too.

This contains 40 European medieval tunes for the recorder, and some with chords for guitar accompaniment. There is music from John Dowland, Michael Praetorius, Claude Gervaise, Orlando Di Lasso, Juan Encina, Adame De La Halle, Guillame D'Amiens, Tilman Susato, P. Phalese, August Normiger, Paul Peurl, Giocanni Anerio, Erasmus Widmann, Johann Herman Schein, Andreas Hammerschmidt, and the one which struck me most, Richard Coeur de Leon.The music isn't difficult to play. I'm afraid I would struggle to match it to the grading system, but would hazard a guess from my own abilities that for anyone who is doing a GCSE in music, or has done Grade 2, this should be fairly straightforward stuff.If, like me, you like Medieval recorder music - then this is great. It's fascinating to play some of these tunes. I'm probably being slightly demanding, in that ideally, I'd have liked a paragraph about the composers, or a page about the history of Medieval recorder music, but this has certainly got me playing again.

Inevitably, given the lack of written notation for the early part of the period, some of these are the short but memorable/catchy pieces. However there is some interesting material. The "written by Richard the Lionheart" claim ensured that one got an early playing!

good for intermediate player