Orlando Gibbons Keyboard Music
Two generations ago, when it was perhaps still fashionable to describe the late sixteenth century in English music as an Elizabethan ‘golden age’, that period was extended to close, not with the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, but at the end of the reign of James I in 1625. There were some good reasons for this: many of the composers and the stylistic trends did not end conveniently or otherwise with the demise of a monarch; but the year 1625, while marking a decided shift away from the musical developments whose direct threads are identifiably English, and being a ‘rounder’ figure in date terms, synchronises well with the deaths of three of the foremost composers of that final phase of the insular musical progress: William Byrd (d.1623), Orlando Gibbons (d.1625) and John Bull (who possibly counts less in this equation, in that he was out of the country after 1613) (d.1628). Gibbons was the youngest of this trio, yet his short adult life, spent from 1603 at the Chapel Royal and the royal court in London, was one whose compositional fruits reveal him to have been at the forefront of the profession. Even some 90 years later, when early-eighteenth-century musical sympathies were not generally with past ages, Thomas Tudway, himself a product of the Chapel Royal as a chorister just after the Restoration, extolled Gibbons's virtues as ‘that most Excellent Artist ... whose whole Service ... with severall Anthems &c., are the most perfect pieces of Church Compositions which have appeared since the time of Mr Tallis & Mr Bird,’ and also that ‘throughout all his compositions, [he] has alone maintain’d, the Harmony, & dignity of the Church Style ...’ Gibbons was born into a musical family in Oxford in 1583, and baptised on Christmas Day that year. His father had moved from Cambridge (the family seems to have been somewhat peripatetic at the time, running the waits — the municipal band of musicians — in both university towns) and his elder brother, Edward, held a lay clerkship at King’s College from 1591/2. It is therefore not surprising that the young Orlando should have been received at King’s as a chorister in February 1595/6, particularly as Edward began, soon after his own arrival at the college, to instruct the choristers and act as their master. For a short while Orlando was a sizar (a student paying reduced fees) in 1598, but his name disappears from the college records shortly thereafter. Edward left King’s probably in the winter of 1598, so it is possible that Orlando left with him, but neither of them is heard about until Orlando’s appearance in Chapel Royal records in 1603, and, although we know that Edward was in Exeter by 1607, he could well have been there before 1603. It was unusual for someone to be appointed to such a prestigious establishment as the Chapel Royal at such a young age, so the gap in Gibbons’s biography after Cambridge may have contained some event which promoted his interests. Exeter musicians were not unknown at the royal court. Arthur Cock, whose salaried place Orlando Gibbons was eventually to succeed to, had himself been at Exeter from 1589 to 1601, where he might have encountered Edward Gibbons, if we can assume that Orlando’s elder brother (possibly both of the brothers) had moved there soon after Cambridge. This may provide the link — that of personal recommendation by one of the Chapel Royal organists, foreseeing the continual need for new blood. As it happened, Cock was to die in January 1605. The court of James I placed a wider emphasis on equality of musical diversity than had been the practice during Elizabeth’s reign. The king had imported his own customs from Scotland, and there was a greater interest in the standard of music-making outside the Chapel Royal in its various guises, particularly concerning the employment of more notable musicians in those other roles. The ‘King’s Music’, as the extra-cappellar musicians were known, eventually combined forces of ‘wind music’ — some 20 players — violins and viols, and a ‘Private Musick’, or household consort of lutes and voices. Early in the new reign, in 1607, the variety of players for a masque comprised 28 musicians with various lutes, a harpsichord, violins and cornets, and ‘hoboyes’ were used at the royal entrance on that occasion. But it was not just the king who had performers and composers at his command: the smaller royal households (the queen and the royal princes) also maintained their own musicians, so the eventual establishment was very large. In the Chapel Royal itself there were normally three organists who would fulfill the requirements in the various royal chapels, and wherever the monarch travelled. Gibbons became associated with the chapel from May 1603, shortly after the death of Queen Elizabeth, and waited until 21 March 1604/5 for appointment to Cock’s place which had fallen vacant that January. The fantasias are the most remarkable group of pieces, and are the ones where Gibbons displays his contrapuntal skill to the best. This was free composition, and can thus be viewed as the development of the individual ‘points’ of new material without any constraints of pre-existent models. In the end this form can perhaps be seen as outgrowing the keyboard medium, for it possibly finds its culmination in Gibbons’s instrumental fantasias which circulated towards the end of the second decade of the century, and which had obvious influence on other English composers of the next generation. In the keyboard fantasias is some of the greatest musical variety: from the very brief simple single imitative point (4) through the slightly more extended workings of (17) and culminating in the wonderfully-wrought (14) with its different sections and developing textures. This latter, which was one of those which had appeared in Parthenia, is ample demonstration of the consummate mastery which Gibbons must have achieved almost from the start. The gradual build-up of rhythmic tension and the wonderful way the it is released through 8 bars of sequential overlapping cross-rhythms just before the close show the composer’s keyboard compositional technique at its zenith. Andrew Parker: 2001