Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625); ENG

Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) was born into a musical family in Oxford and became one of the foremost English composers and keyboard players of the early seventeenth century. He sang as a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, where his elder brother Edward was master of the choristers, and received a Bachelor of Music degree from Cambridge in 1606. By 1603 he had joined the Chapel Royal and later became organist there, serving the courts of James I and Charles I. In 1623 he was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey. Gibbons died suddenly in Canterbury in 1625 while preparing for the reception of Queen Henrietta Maria following her marriage to Charles I.

Gibbons excelled in virtually every major English genre of his time, writing Anglican church music, madrigals, keyboard pieces, consort music, and songs. His sacred works include the anthems This Is the Record of John and O Clap Your Hands, both notable for their clarity of declamation and contrapuntal mastery. The madrigal The Silver Swan became one of the most famous English part-songs of the period. His fantasias for viol consort and works for virginal display a concentrated contrapuntal imagination that places him among the great English keyboard and chamber composers between Byrd and Purcell. Gibbons’s music combines Renaissance polyphonic discipline with the growing expressive directness of the seventeenth century.

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Read biography at allmusic.com.