Michael Jaffee, who with his wife, Kay Jaffee, founded the Waverly Consort, which specialized in performing music from medieval and Renaissance times and helped fuel a surge of interest in early music over the last half century, died on June 15 in Patterson, N.Y. He was 81.

His family said he died after a fall while working outside on his property, something he loved doing.

Mr. Jaffee was a graduate student at New York University in 1959 when he and a fellow student, Kay Cross, taking a class from the musicologist Gustave Reese, became intrigued by early choral and instrumental music. Professor Reese asked them and some other students if they would try recording repertoire so the whole class could hear it, and the seeds for the Waverly Consort were planted.