CEMPR has a large number of quality instruments available for students to use, many of them from the finest instrument makers in Europe.
For those of you interested in Baroque music we have a complete range of baroque instruments including strings, flutes, oboes and bassoon. Keyboard and continuo players will enjoy using the Department’s ten early keyboards including three harpsichords, clavichords, virginals and two chamber organs, one of the latter an original eighteenth-century house organ by Snetzler. The recent arrival of the spectacular reproduction Tudor organ by Goetze and Gwynne has added another important element to this collection. Brass players have the opportunity to play on exquisitely made natural horns and trumpets. For accompaniment and solo work we also have a Baroque guitar, an archlute, fine theorbo by Martin Haycock as well as medieval and renaissance lutes.
Other instruments available include two consorts of recorders (one Renaissance and one Baroque), cornetts, dulcians, crumhorns, two chests of viols and a consort of sackbuts made for us by a leading British maker, Frank Tomes. If your interests lie in Medieval music, then you will have access to a whole range of string, wind and percussion instruments, including fiddels, rebecs, citole, a late medieval lute by Richard Earle, gittern, a wonderful hand-crafted plucked psaltery, bagpipes, harp, hammered dulcimer, portative organ and a set of shawms by Hanchet.