The Canterbury Waits Page

The Canterbury Waits

Early Music Group

Welcome to the Canterbury Waits web page.

Ursula Fuller, Derek Poole, David Shaw, Timothy Samuelson, Carl Willetts.

Shawms, sackbut and curtal provide the historical centrepiece of a four-piece shawm band specialising in loud ceremonial and dance music from the time of the Plantagenets to the Tudors and Stuarts.
Whole consorts of crumhorns, flutes, recorders and great recorders provide softer sounds more typical of sixteenth century indoor music.
These are supplemented as appropriate by bass viol, harp, rebec, psaltery, harp, cornet, bagpipes, kortholt, sordun, tabors, nakkers, and a variety of other medieval and renaissance instruments.

The Canterbury Waits give full length evening concerts, typically 90 minutes plus interval. In addition to the music they always include explanations and readings both amusing and enlightening.

Please note that we reserve the right to vary these programmes at short notice due to the availability of people, instruments and, not least, the whim of the musicians.

Sounds of the past. A demonstration of our collection of sixteenth century style musical instruments.
The Old Town waits and Their Music. A talk on the history, music and work of the old city waits.

The Canterbury Waits can provide music of the right period mood for fairs, medieval banquets, and plays, in costume if required by prior arrangement.

Since their foundation in 1970, the Canterbury Waits have played for BBC Schools and local radio, for a commercial video (A Blow-by-blow Account of Renaissance Sword-fighting), for many Kentish dramatic societies and music and historical societies in the Home Counties.

Full listings of The Canterbury Waits activities are included on our other pages:

Click the links to hear playing by the Canterbury Waits on:

Crumhorns- L'arboscello Ballo Furlano

Please note these MP3 files may be slow to load. They will open in your standard media player.

For other early music activities in the South of England, see the Web site of the Southern Early Music Forum http://www.semf.org.uk

For general information about Waits bands and links to other groups, see http://waits.org.uk

This page was last modified on January 13, 2012

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