John Bull (1562-1628); ENG

John Bull (c. 1562/63–1628) was an English composer, organist, and keyboard virtuoso who ranked among the most brilliant instrumental musicians of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Probably born in Somerset, he became a chorister and later organist at Hereford Cathedral before joining the Chapel Royal. He earned degrees in music at Oxford and Cambridge and in 1597 became the first Public Reader in Music at Gresham College, London. Bull enjoyed a considerable reputation as a performer and served at the royal court, but his career in England ended abruptly in 1613 when he fled to the Low Countries amid personal scandal. He eventually settled in Antwerp, where he became organist of the cathedral and remained until his death. His continental career helped transmit English keyboard traditions to musicians in northern Europe.

Bull’s surviving music is dominated by works for keyboard, including fantasias, dances, variations, canons, and elaborate contrapuntal pieces that display extraordinary technical ingenuity. Many appear in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, one of the principal sources of English keyboard music from the period. Works such as Walsingham and The King’s Hunt demonstrate his flair for variation, brilliant figuration, and vivid keyboard effects. He also composed sacred vocal music and instrumental works, although attribution problems surround portions of his output. Bull delighted in complex canonic devices and sometimes pushed keyboard technique to remarkable levels of virtuosity. Together with William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, he stands among the foremost composers of the English virginalist school, and his later work in Antwerp contributed to the broader European development of seventeenth-century keyboard style.

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Read biography at allmusic.com.