There is no declaration in this piece: no indication for the future, and no looking backward for solace. The use of Renaissance instruments is not related to any general programmatic idea. What decided about the use of those instruments was simply their slightly defective tone, which suited my concept of sound better than the sound of our contemporary strings and winds.
The systematic distortion of the standard sound of instruments, which has found its fully legitimate place in the techniques and material of new music, has inspired me to invert our way of thinking about composing sound colour. Already as a musicology student in Argentina, I began to draft such a composition, but I abandoned the project as at that time it was impossible to bring together a full Renaissance orchestra. Today, however, we are experiencing a renaissance of the Renaissance and such an ensemble can be put together, as most of the instruments can be reconstructed and many musicians have been trained to play them.
These developments have made it possible to orchestrate the piece for 22 musicians divided into “choirs,” representing the typical families of instruments: four crumhorns or four recorders, four pommers or four dulcians, a cornett, a clarion, three Renaissance trombones, a regal and a positive, an alto lute and a theorbo, percussion (played by two musicians), dulcimer, two violas da braccio and four violas da gamba (drawings of all these instruments can be found in Praetorius’ Syntagma Musicum of 1619).
In recent years I have familiarised myself with those instruments well enough to rethink their sound functions and extend their conventional playing techniques. Even an instrument such as the recorder, despite all the odium of banal music exercise at home or at school, has proved closer to new instrumental music in its sound potential than an ordinary flute.
In this piece, each voice is composed as a solo part. The score, notated more or less conventionally, emerged simultaneously with the parts. For this reason, other versions are also possible, using any combination of the instruments from the original line-up, from one to twenty two musicians. The joint title for these versions is Kammermusik für Renaissance–Instrumente. The term Zufallsorchester (random orchestra), referring to a common Renaissance practice, is applied here in its literal sense of transformations unplanned by the composer. Though the work has been dedicated to the memory of Claudio Monteverdi, it contains no collages of early music.

Mauricio Kagel, 1967
(From the Mauricio Kagel archive in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel)