Orlando Gibbons was blessed to be born into a musical family. His father and three brothers all worked as professional musicians. Gibbons thus naturally gravitated toward the same craft, and though he died relatively young, his career outshone them all. As a singer and keyboardist, he was admitted to the Chapel Royal at age 20, remaining a member until his death; he also served as a private King's Musician and as organist to Westminster Abbey. As a composer, he left a wealth of madrigals and music for the Anglican church. The venerable Oxford University awarded him the degree Doctor of Music in 1622. On May 17 of that year, when Gibbons and his close friend William Heyther were both given the doctorate degree, it was only fitting that the ceremony be graced with a new piece of Gibbons' own composition. That piece was his jubilant full anthem O clap your hands. O clap your hands appropriately flaunts Gibbons' mature skill; it presents a virtual catalog of Tudor church music compositional techniques. As a full anthem, it employs no soloists or necessary instrumental accompaniment, but rather exploits the full, eight-voiced textures of the English Cathedral choir. Each successive verse of its text, making up of all but one verse of the joyous Psalm 47 plus a full doxology (Gloria patri), uses a subtly different facet of Gibbons' musical expression. The opening verse slowly expands through the musical space in a pair of imitative motives, while the first mention of the name of God arrives on a sudden accidental inflection. The passage claiming God's place as "great King" features lively triple-meter cross-rhythms, followed by still chords embodying the people's submission before Him. A striking imitative motive leaping up a full octave evokes God's action of "choosing out" His heritage. Even the poetic rubric "Selah" is marked by a cadence and double bar. The second part, "God is gone up," again begins with imitation, this time beginning in the vocal heights. Much of the second half exploits the contrast between the two halves of the choir, the four decani voices answering the cantori. The spatial antiphony carries through a long series of exclamations on "O sing praises," and continues later in a higher register to claim God as "highly exalted." The text concludes with a liturgically proper doxology, which Gibbons places within a kaleidoscope of shifting vocal textures.

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