O Bando de Surunyo is an ensemble specializing in the performance of 16th and 17th-century music. The name is taken from a 17th-century Portuguese villancico and means "flock of starlings." The ensemble serves as the performance and laboratory core of a multidisciplinary project that focuses particularly on unpublished repertoire preserved in Portuguese sources, presenting modern premieres of previously unheard works in almost all of its concerts. The project, however, encompasses music from both home and abroad, aiming to connect the audience, through music and poetry, with the plurality, eclecticism, and richness of the European Renaissance and Baroque thought and imagination.

Our concerts are prepared on a rigorous foundation of musicological research and the in-depth study of the historical and cultural context of the music we perform. All works are prepared directly from the original manuscripts or prints and performed using historically informed instruments and performance practices.

The intimate relationship between sound and word that emerges in music during the transition from the 16th to the 17th century is the central axis of O Bando de Surunyo’s approach to the study and interpretation of the repertoire. Sound was then placed at the service of the text, conveying, illustrating, and enhancing its poetic and affective content. The effective and eloquent transmission of this content in its multiple readings and functions — literal, theatrical, historical, symbolic, religious, political, and philosophical — forms the basis for constructing an interpretive approach that pursues the same goal today as the music of that era: to entertain and move the audience through word, gesture, and sound. The entire project thus assumes a broad aesthetic and communicative scope where, by making use of historical performance practices and soundscapes, it seeks to create an artistic object that is relevant and meaningful to today's audience.