tootling plaintively

Nicky was off allotmenting today and I had to pop into work briefly but my phone reminded me that there was some free Early Music at the museum this afternoon to which I eventually popped. I thought it would just be in the main hall area of the new bit seeing as the old bit will be out of action for two more years but there were various groups or people secreted in various little bits of the ground (or whichever floor you enter on) floor parping, plucking, scraping and tootling away. There was a bloke playing something of the harp family who I didn't catch playing anything as he was too busy speaking in a droningly posh voice every time I went past. Three people playing viols took up a pleasant half-hour and this lot were fighting against the perils of a large, echoey space full of sugar-charged children but were pleasantly tootly if sillily dressed. Just out of shot is a bloke playing a thin-sounding single-drone bagpipe, the rearward woman was making oboe-pitched noises and the one at the front looks like a shawm, essentially clarinetty of sound. Quite a pleasant noise; a few visits-to-parents ago I ripped some of my dad's collection of dufay collective music which gets aired fairly regularly. Good old-fashioned stuff you can whistle, not like this modern nonsense you get nowadays. This lot appear to be local and are playing nearby in a couple of weeks, along to which I might pop.