It mustn’t have been easy to be a peasant in the fifteen- and sixteen-hundreds. Work was hard, life was structured, comforts were few.
The common people did have music, however. They could sing, of course, and had done so since time immemorial, but there were also village musicians now on the scene, and they would sometimes perform both for their own enjoyment and that of their fellows. Some even thought to take the time to write these melodies down, and as a result, we have some of the popular music of the Renaissance available to us today. We’ll hear a sample on this Sunday’s program.