David Munrow

David John Munrow emerged during his short professional life as one of the most dynamic and transformative figures in Britain’s early-music revival. Following secondary school he spent a year teaching in South America before returning to England to read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, completing his degree between 1961 and 1964. An accomplished and enthusiastic flautist, he established a group devoted to early music while still an undergraduate. After graduation he pursued further study of seventeenth-century repertoire at Birmingham University. His encounter with the wooden flutes central to South American indigenous traditions sparked a lasting fascination with members of the recorder family and similar instruments.

During those years enthusiasm for early music was steadily increasing across England, and Munrow quickly became one of the most sought-after recorder players. In 1967 he assembled the Early Music Consort of London, whose original members included countertenor James Bowman, violist Oliver Brookes, lutenist James Tyler and harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood. The ensemble’s inaugural concert took place that same year in Louvain, followed by its London debut in 1968. Also in 1967 he joined the faculty of Leicester University as a lecturer in early music. The Consort’s lively, colourful and at times audacious approach startled both mainstream concert promoters and the nascent early-music community, yet remained faithful to the limits of historical knowledge. What had previously been regarded as dry, academic exercises suddenly became vibrant public events that attracted large general audiences.

The group performed frequently on television and maintained a parallel commitment to new music. Several contemporary composers consequently wrote for its period instruments, among them Peter Dickinson, whose Translations appeared in 1971, Elisabeth Lutyens, whose The Tears of Night followed in 1972, and Peter Maxwell Davies, who employed the Consort as the onstage band for his opera Taverner in 1972, a work centred on a medieval English composer.

In 1969 Munrow began teaching recorder at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Two years later he launched a series of radio talks for the BBC under the title “Pied Piper,” originally conceived for younger listeners yet enjoyed by audiences of every age. In 1976, for reasons that have never been fully clarified, he ended his own life. Had he lived longer, he would almost certainly have been counted among the most influential musicians of the second half of the twentieth century.