Joy

Pastance

Pastance came together in 1993 to perform mediaeval and Renaissance music. Based in Sydney, the ensemble has reached the early-music fraternity and a wide public, from folk festivals and formal concerts to schools, corporate feasts and open-air markets.

John Dowland

John Dowland's lute songs and ayres carry a rare, deliberate melancholy: tears that fall in measured pavans, love that stings in galliards, darkness that still sings. His music remains the living heart of the English Renaissance songbook.

Francesco Landini

Francesco Landini (c. 1325–1397) was a Florentine composer, poet, organist and singer, and a central figure of the Italian Trecento. Blind from childhood, he left a large body of madrigals and ballate that dominate the surviving sources of fourteenth-century Italian polyphony.

Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut's songs of courtly love sit at the heart of fourteenth-century French music: virelais, ballades and rondeaux where longing, grace and intricate rhyme meet the rhythmic daring of the ars nova.

Pierre Attaingnant

Pierre Attaingnant (c. 1494–1552) was a pioneering French music printer and publisher whose work helped shape the circulation of Renaissance music across Europe. Based in Paris, he became one of the first printers to use single-impression movable type for music, a breakthrough that made printed scores faster and more economical to produce.

Hildegard von Bingen

Alex Cronin

Multi-instrumentalist Alex Cronin trained as a lutenist in Australia and Holland. As a lutenist and guitarist he has performed with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Brandenburg Orchestra, Opera Australia and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, among others.

John Dunstable

John Dunstable's surviving music is sacred and vocal: isorhythmic motets, mass movements and Marian antiphons built on full triadic harmony, with a liking for thirds and sixths that marked the English manner of the early fifteenth century.

Donato da Firenze

Henry VIII

Henry VIII (1491–1547), King of England, was also an accomplished musician whose surviving songs and instrumental consorts belong to the early Tudor court repertory.