A guide to
Orlando Gibbons
Oxford 1583 — Canterbury 1625
Orlando Gibbons was the last great master of the English virginalist school and, by the end of his short life, the leading keyboard player and church composer in England. Baptised in Oxford on 25 December 1583 into a large musical family — his father was a town wait, his brothers and his son all professional musicians — he was raised in Cambridge, where he joined the choir of King’s College in 1596. By 1605, in his early twenties, he was sworn a Gentleman and organist of the Chapel Royal, the centre of English court music, a post he held for the rest of his life.
His instrumental gift was famous in his own day. Contemporaries called him “the best hand in England” at the keyboard — and the verdict survives in the music: about forty-five keyboard pieces of unusual gravity and contrapuntal command, set apart from the dazzling figuration of his rivals by their weight and seriousness. Glenn Gould, who recorded the pavans and fantasias three centuries later, called Gibbons’s music the work that “has moved me more deeply than any other sound experience.”
Parthenia and the keyboard
In about 1612-13 appeared Parthenia, “the first musicke that ever was printed for the virginals” — a slim, beautifully engraved collection of twenty-one pieces by three composers, the aged William Byrd, John Bull, and Gibbons, all named on the title page as Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. Gibbons’s six pieces, among them the famous Lord of Salisbury his Pavin, place the youngest of the three in the company of his elders as an equal. It is the foundation document of printed English keyboard music.
Beyond the keyboard, Gibbons wrote some thirty viol fantasias, a body of verse anthems — This is the Record of John, the eight-part O Clap Your Hands — that are pillars of the Anglican repertoire, and the haunting madrigal “The Silver Swan.” It is a remarkably varied output for a man who did not live to forty-two.
The sudden death at Canterbury
In 1623 Gibbons added the organ of Westminster Abbey to his court duties, and it was in that role that he played at the funeral of James I early in 1625. That summer the Chapel Royal travelled to Canterbury to await the arrival from Dover of the new queen, Henrietta Maria, bride of Charles I. There, on Whitsunday, 5 June 1625, Gibbons collapsed and died — of an apoplectic seizure, a sudden brain haemorrhage — at the age of forty-one. The Chapel Royal cheque-book records it plainly: “Mr Orlando Gibbons organist, died the 5th of June, being then Whitsunday at Canterbury.”
He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, where his widow raised the bust that still marks the spot. His son Christopher carried the family’s music into the next age — and taught the young Henry Purcell — so that the line ran on from the last virginalist into the English Baroque. Few composers have left so concentrated a body of fine music in so short a life.