[2] He reached Lima by train from São Paulo and later spent some time touring Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Chile, immersing himself in the traditional music of Latin America and collecting folk instruments.

[3] While reading English for a master's degree[4] at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he became involved in musical performance, playing South American instruments in a students' autumn-term concert organised by Christopher Hogwood.

[6] By 1967 he was appointed a part-time lecturer in early music history at the University of Leicester, having married Gillian Veronica Reid the previous year.

[7] He also taught early woodwind instruments at King’s College London, where his mentor, Thurston Dart, had recently been appointed head of the new music department.

[10] Subsequently, demand for such historical instruments increased dramatically, resulting in Munrow's encouragement for the formation of a business specialising in this area, which is still trading as The Early Music Shop, established in 1968 and now based in Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

On BBC Radio 3 he presented 655 editions of Pied Piper, a multi-ethnic and centuries-spanning spread of music from Monteverdi to the Electric Light Orchestra rock group.

Apart from his regular radio slot and other programmes, he appeared on television, most notably on BBC 2 in a series entitled Ancestral Voices in a London studio, and on ITV's Early Musical Instruments, filmed on location at Ordsall Hall in Salford.

In 1976, Munrow hanged himself while in a state of depression; the recent deaths of his father and father-in-law, to whom he dedicated his sole book, are thought to have contributed to his decision to take his own life.

"The Fairie Round" from Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs by Anthony Holborne was included among a compilation of sounds and images which had been chosen as examples of the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

Information about the life and work of David Munrow can be found in obituaries about him in 1976 (particularly the OUP journal Early Music), and in the following sources: a detailed piece in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Christopher Hogwood; The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; The Art of David Munrow, a record set with a biography by Arthur Johnson, the producer of Pied Piper; and on the old vinyl sleeve of the Renaissance Suite.