Born in Córdoba, Argentina, Ramiro Amusategui began his music studies at the Instituto Domenico Zipoli, specialising in the guitar at the Conservatorio Provincial de Córdoba. From a very early age, he played in early music groups, such as the Conjunto de Instrumentos Antiguos del Instituto Goethe and the Grupo de Estudios de Música Antigua de Neuquén.

In 1987 Amusategui began to concentrate on the ‘ud, the Arab lute, and subsequently joined various bands from widely varying musical traditions, from early music to traditional music to jazz. As the lutenist in Ars Antiqua Musicalis, the Grupo de Danza Hispano-Árabe, the Ballet Teatro Español, Al Azar, Radio Tarifa and other groups, he has toured throughout Spain and the rest of Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, Morocco, Turkey and Egypt.

Ramiro Amusategui has taught music and guitar in various Conservatories and Cultural Institutes as well as running music teaching courses. In 1989 he founded the group La Clave - música para niños, which is dedicated to involving children in listening to and playing music. As a musician and arranger, Amusategui has been involved in countless recordings and in producing and performing music for radio, film, theatre and television.

Daniel Carranza was born in Bilbao. His musical studies began with the guitar, but he soon developed a fascination for earlier plucked stringed instruments such as the lute, theorbo, vihuela and the baroque guitar and he began studying with Jorge Fresno. His studies in Paris centred on the basso continuo, to which he has dedicated a significant part of his professional development. He has also taken part in various courses with Hopkinson Smith. As a teacher, Carranza has run courses at conservatories and universities, including the Escuela de Canto del Orfeón Donostiarra, the Conservatorio de Bilbao, the Voice and Chamber Music course at Altafulla, the Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala and the Conservatorio de Managua, Nicaragua.

Carranza has performed widely as a soloist in numerous early music groups, as well as with orchestras such as the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, the Euskadi Symphony Orchestra, the Xoven Orquesta de Galicia under the direction of Nicholas Cleobury and Nicholas Kramer, among others, alongside his playing with other musicians and soloists. He forms a duo with his fellow lutenist Juan Carlos de Mulder, with whom he has recorded Fantasías y Diferencias – Música par dos vihuelas on the Fonti Musicali label. He works as a musician and technical director in the group Camerata Iberia, with whom he recorded Songs & Dances from the Spanish Renaissance for MA Recordings.

The Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico commissioned Carranza to compose the music for Molière’s Le Misanthrope, directed by Adolfo Marsillach, with whom he also presented Una noche con los clásicos. For the same theatre company, Carranza created the music for Calderón’s La vida es sueño.

Daniel Carranza has performed throughout Spain, Europe, the Near East and Central America. He is a partner in and the artistic producer of the recording label Jubal Media Productions, under whose aegis he played as a musician in the recordings of Cartas al rey moro, with Begoña Olavide and Mudéjar, and Cifra nueva para dos vihuelas with JC de Mulder.

Born in Seville, Fahmi Alqhai began to teach himself music at an early age. His formal training began in 1994 at the Conservatorio Superior Manuel Castillo, where he studied the viola da gamba under Ventura Rico, receiving excellent grades. He continued his studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with Paolo Pandolfo and at the Conservatorio di Lugano under the guidance of Vittorio Ghielmi. He is also a qualified dental surgeon (University of Seville).
 
Alqhai is a regular member of many leading chamber groups, including Il Suonar Parlante (Vittorio Ghielmi), Mala Punica (Pedro Memelsdorff), Orphénica Lyra (José Miguel Moreno) and Mudéjar (Begoña Olavide), giving concerts at top early music festivals throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America. As a teacher, he took part in the XI Castillo de Aracena Early Music Fair alongside musicians of the stature of Hopkinson Smith. He has made numerous recordings for record labels, television and radio programmes.
 
Alqhai began his career as a soloist in 1998 together with the Sevillian spinet player Javier Nuñez, with whom he has given concerts throughout Spain to great critical and public acclaim. In 1999 he was the musical director of El Misterio Velázquez, produced by Producciones Imperdibles at the Alcázares in Seville. In the same year, with the soprano Mariví Blasco, he formed the trio Accademia del Piacere. Apart from early music, he has played flamenco at the Bienal de Flamenco in Seville, as well as making forays into contemporary music and jazz.

Carlos Paniagua began his musical apprenticeship in the group Atrium Musicae, of which he was a member from 1964 to 1979. It was here that he developed his passionate interest in making mediaeval musical instruments, at a time when it was all but impossible to acquire faithful reproductions. This led inevitably to his still continuing involvement in researching little-known mediaeval instruments through their contemporary artistic representation, on the one hand, and on the other, refining their construction through performance. His work as a musician and luthier overcame his training as an architect.

In 1979 Paniagua co-founded the early music group Calamus, where he developed a particular fascination for Arab-Andalusian music and its instruments, and began to work as a professional luthier specialising in mediaeval, renaissance and baroque stringed instruments. In 1993 he was one of a select group of European luthiers who were brought together by the Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza to research and recreate the mediaeval instruments sculpted in the Portico de la Gloria of the Cathedral of Santiago de la Compostela.

Carlos Paniagua regularly participates in conferences on mediaeval instruments, giving presentations at congresses of luthiers in Europe and the Arab world, as well as running courses on instrument-making and writing articles on the instruments and their evolution. He has been a member of Mudéjar since its foundation, and most of the instruments used by the group come from his hands.

As a musician, Paniagua is a percussionist and psaltery player. He has toured throughout Europe, in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Lebanon, Israel, the United States, Canada and Japan. He has also worked in theatre, film and television. He has taken part in 14 recordings with Atrium Musicae, two with Calamus and four with Mudéjar.

Pedro Estevan studied percussion at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, where he specialised in contemporary music and became a founder-member of the Grupo de Percusión de Madrid. He moved on to study contemporary percussion with Sylvio Gualda, African percussion with the Senegalese maestro Doudou Ndiaye Rose and tambourine technique with Glen Vélez.

An inveterate freelance musician, Estevan has been a member of various jazz bands, a session musician and founder of Rarafonía, Orquesta de las Nubes, together with María Villa and Suso Sáiz, and of Pan-Ku Percusíon. He is currently a regular collaborator with Hesperion XXI, Le Concert des Nations, Mizrab, Mudéjar and Grupo Círculo.

He has worked with many important national and international musical formations such as the Orquesta Nacional de España, the Orquesta de Radio Televisión Española, the Orquesta Gulbenkian of Lisbon, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, the Grupo Koan, the phonetic music group Glotis, the Orchestra of the 18th Century, Les Sacqueboutiers de Toulouse, the Paul Winter Consort, Camerata Iberia, AnLeuT Música, La Romanesca, Accentus, Sinfonye, the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, the Harp Consort, the Ensemble Kapsberger, Kepa Junkera, Al Ayre Español and Orphenica Lyra.

As a soloist, Pedro Estevan has given concerts with the Orquesta de Cámara Nacional de España and with the Orquesta Reina Sofía. He has participated in the Milano-Poesia festival, in the Fourth Biennial Brisbane Music Festival, in Nafarroako-Jaialdiak and in various music cycles with exclusively percussion programmes. In the same vein, he has given concerts using the ‘sound sculptures’ of the Baschet brothers.

Estevan has been involved in various theatrical productions directed by Lluis Pasqual and by Nuria Espert. He composed the music for Alesio by I García May and for La Gran Sultana by Miguel Cervantes, both drected by Adolfo Marsillach. He was the musical director of the production of El Caballero de Olmedo by Lope de Vega, which was directed by Lluis Pasqual for L’Odéon-Theatre de l’Europe.

He has recorded for radio and television in Spain, France, the UK, Norway, the USA, Canada and Australia and played on more than one hundred recordings, including two of his own: Nocturnos y Alevosías and El Aroma del Tiempo.