1583–1625 · Baroque
Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) was an English composer, organist and harpsichordist. Born in Oxford into a family of musicians, he grew up in Cambridge, served in the Chapel Royal in London and, from 1623, at Westminster Abbey. His madrigal The Silver Swan and his pieces for the virginals are still performed, and the sheet music for the madrigal is available on this site.
Gibbons was born at Oxford. No exact birth date survives; all we know is that he was baptised at the church of St Martin on Christmas Day 1583. Over the centuries his family gave England several generations of musicians. His father, William, headed the town musicians (the waits), first in Cambridge and later in Oxford, and in Oxford he held a seat on the city council.
Around 1588 the family went back to Cambridge, where his father resumed his old job. His eldest brother, Edward, was a composer who directed the choir at King's College in Cambridge. Ellis, the next brother, was a promising composer who died early, while Ferdinando, the third, later stepped into his father's role among the waits.
Little is known of Gibbons's youth. He was most probably taught the keyboard, and possibly the viol. In February 1596 he joined the choir of King's College, led by Edward, and sang there until 1598. In the summer of 1598 Orlando enrolled at the college itself on reduced terms: his fees were lower, but in return he had to carry out various chores. In 1598–1599 his name still turns up now and then in the choir lists.
Who taught Gibbons to compose is unknown. He may have gone on studying with Edward, or he may have learned from William Byrd, the most respected English composer of the day: the two later published music together with John Bull. As his years in the choir drew to a close, in 1599, Orlando was already writing music. Nothing is known about the next few years, until 1603.
By May 1603 Gibbons was listed among the musicians of the Chapel Royal, the community of clergy and players who served the monarch and the court. For the moment he was a gentleman extraordinary, that is, an unpaid substitute waiting for a vacancy. That year was uneven for him: he won his first professional post, yet his mother died, and so did his brother Ellis.
The vacancy opened when Arthur Cook died that January, and Gibbons took the post of junior organist, with the rank of gentleman of the chapel, on 21 March 1605. Help may have come from Edward, who was a friend of both the earlier organist Cook and the chapel's chief organist, John Bull. Orlando held on to the post until he died.
Elizabeth Patten became Gibbons's wife on 17 February 1606. Her father, John Patten, had a place in the vestry of the Chapel Royal and most likely knew the groom well. That same year Orlando earned a Cambridge degree, Bachelor of Music. The couple made their home in Westminster, in St Margaret's parish, where their seven children were christened: James, Alice, Christopher, Ann, Mary, Elizabeth and Orlando.
By the 1610s Gibbons was a well-known composer and England's foremost organist. Sir Christopher Hatton became his close friend and an important patron. Thanks to Hatton's backing, a book of madrigals and motets for voice and viol was printed in 1612; it contains The Silver Swan, which is often seen as the most famous of English madrigals. Gibbons dedicated the entire book to Hatton.
Parthenia, the earliest printed anthology of English keyboard music, also contained six pieces by Gibbons, who appeared there next to the older masters Byrd and Bull. It was issued to mark the wedding of Princess Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V of the Palatinate. Two more of his anthems were printed in 1614 in a book edited by William Leighton. By 1615 he was co-organist of the Chapel Royal with Edmund Hooper, and that year King James I gave him two grants totalling 150 pounds.
Gibbons was clearly the foremost musician at court towards the close of the 1610s: Byrd had long lived in retirement in Essex, and Bull had gone abroad to the Low Countries late in 1614. A group of seventeen players was assembled by John Cooper for Prince Charles (later Charles I) in 1617, and Gibbons joined as its sole keyboardist.
For James I's journey to Scotland in 1617 he composed the anthem Great King of Gods and a song for the court, Do not repine, fair sun. From 1619 Gibbons also served as royal chamber musician and virginalist. In 1620, a report says, a servant from the chapel vestry attacked him for no reason and ripped his collar.
In 1623 George Wither's Hymnes and Songs of the Church appeared, with tunes by Gibbons for most of the songs. That year he took over from John Parsons as organist at Westminster Abbey, where Thomas Day became his junior. It was probably the weightiest appointment of his career. Contemporaries rated his playing highly: John Hacket, recalling the 1624 visit of the French ambassador, remarked that the abbey organ was being played by the finest performer of his age, Orlando Gibbons.
In 1625 Gibbons conducted the service at the funeral of James I. As the court got ready to welcome Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, members of the Chapel Royal headed for Canterbury. There Orlando fell suddenly ill, probably with a brain haemorrhage, and died, and he was laid to rest in Canterbury Cathedral. His colleagues were shaken; people talked less about the cause than about the hurried burial and the body never going back to London.
Elizabeth, Gibbons's widow, died not much more than a year afterwards, and Orlando's eldest brother, Edward, took charge of the orphans.
In his lifetime Gibbons was regarded above all as a church composer. He wrote about forty anthems, psalms and hymns, and music for the Anglican service, both with organ or a consort and unaccompanied. In these works he carried forward the polyphonic style of Tallis and Byrd. Among the anthems with a soloist is This is the Record of John, in which a solo countertenor or tenor trades phrases with the choir. He also set the evening service twice on a large scale, as the Short Service and the Second Service. His choral anthems include O Lord, in thy wrath, and O clap your hands together, an eight-voice anthem for Ascension Day.
Today his secular music is heard more often. Gibbons left some forty-five keyboard pieces: fantasias, dances and variations; among them are pieces for the virginals, the English kind of spinet. The fantasias are usually complex, in several sections, built on imitative treatment of several subjects. The composer steadily develops simple musical ideas, as in the Pavane in D minor and in the pavan and galliard Lord Salisbury. He also wrote about thirty fantasias for viols and madrigals; in the madrigals, writers note English, Scottish and Irish folk tunes and the influence of the Italian model.
Musicologists see in Gibbons's music a bridge between Renaissance and Baroque. It is marked by a democratic spirit and flexible, vivid imagery, and he is counted among the most significant forerunners of Henry Purcell. He wrote mostly in genres where he had already made his name and rarely strayed from them.
For players, the site has the sheet music of the madrigal The Silver Swan, at intermediate level. It is a good way to meet a composer who after his death was long remembered mainly as a church composer.
Gibbons's influence lasted into the next generation. He built on the foundations of the English madrigal and anthem laid by Byrd, and his eldest son, Christopher, became the teacher of John Blow, Pelham Humfrey and Henry Purcell. Interest in him returned with the early music revival: his keyboard pieces were championed by Glenn Gould, and early music ensembles love his madrigals and viol fantasias.