Toss the Feathers

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish composers invented a new sort of “chamber music”. In addition to ballads and dance tunes, they wrote variations over repeating basses, sonatas, suites, “dompes” and “ports”.

This inspired fusion of popular and classical music offers modern audiences a repertoire that blends refined taste and sparkling energy, elegance and vibrant enthusiasm, harmonic complexity and rhythmic spontaneity.

Toss the Feathers ( Tina Chancey and Valerie Loomer) plays this music on instruments that the composers knew : harps, renaissance violin, Irish whistles, theorbo, viola da gamba and renaissance guitar. Many of the tunes that we perform are still played by traditional musicians today.