The name’s Bull, John Bull

Portrait of John Bull in the University of Oxford: around it is written “The Bull by force in fields doth raigne/ But Bull by skill good-will doth gaine”

As John Bull stares out at us across the ages, of his name we can at least be certain. As for his life story, that is hazy, to say the least. Was he, for a brief period, one of Queen Elizabeth’s secret agents abroad? Why did he apply to change his name and emigrate to the Netherlands? Did he write the National Anthem as recorded beneath the portrait above. ¹ In a 1986 review of Walker Cunningham’s book The Keyboard Music of John Bull, Oliver Neighbour, my erstwhile senior colleague at the British Library, wrote “Everything about Bull is difficult, starting with the difficulty of playing his music”. Biographical details, apart from postings and degree awards, are sketchy and frequently sensational: authors and radio presenters compete to see who can uncover the longest list of incidents. Here’s the BBC programme synopsis for Lucy Skeaping’s Early Music Show in August 2008:

Blighted by poverty, dismissed from at least three jobs, a victim of highway robbery, robbed by pirates and involved in a scandal which led to a self-imposed exile from his homeland, Dr John Bull had more than his fair share of difficulties throughout his life. 

And here’s Andrew Gant in O sing unto the Lord:

In the congregation of naughty men, Bull probably outranks even Thomas Weekes. Scandal, usury, dashing of teeth and getting of children followed him all over Europe. He was a brilliant keyboard virtuoso, and composer of a small number of intense, skilful, sacred vocal pieces during the short time the Chapel Royal managed to put up with him, as well as at least one really good verse anthem, the splendid, expansive Epiphany piece, ‘O God, who by the leading of a star’, which has one of the best last pages of the entire period. He fled the country on charges of adultery and assault, and ended his life in poverty in Antwerp; he was memorably described in a precautionary letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the British envoy in Antwerp: “The man hath more music in him than honesty and is famous for marrying of virginity as he is for fingering of organs and virginals”.

The entry in Grove’s first Dictionary of Music (1879), was compiled by Edward Rimbault who admitted to a certain amount of “conjecture” in recounting the composer’s life and later musicologists have cast doubts on Rimbault’s reliability. Tim Neighbour and Susi Jeans collaborated on the New Grove entry for Bull, their work benefitting from a thoroughly updated re-appraisal of Bull’s oeuvre and the unfinished biography by Thurston Dart, the draft chapters of which were bequeathed to Susi Jeans in 1974 on condition that “the Bull biographical material was not assumed to be correct”. ² That same set of draft chapters is now held in The Thurston Dart Archive at Cambridge University Library and has the following note concerning access attached, dated 1993: “No biographical material in Dart’s work be assumed now to be correct”.

You see what Tim Neighbour meant by “difficulty”! I’ll refrain from seeking out further revelations and give you, instead, this succinct and unsensational resumé provided as part of a lecture by Bull’s 21st-century successor at Gresham College, Dr Ingrid Pearson. ³:
In celebrating the past let us salute the vision of Sir Thomas Gresham which resulted in the establishment, in 1597, of Gresham College. The first Gresham Professor of Music, John Bull, was appointed by Queen Elizabeth I herself. [An account of Bull was given in 1838 by the then Gresham Professor of Music, Edward Taylor]. It reads: Dr. Bull had graduated in music at Cambridge, and was admitted afterwards to the same honour at Oxford in 1592. Five years after this time… the appointment of the musical professor was referred to Queen Elizabeth, and her Majesty was pleased to confer it on Dr. Bull…. Dr. Bull had only filled the office of Gresham Professor 4 years, when ill health interrupted the discharge of his duties; and, with a view to its restoration, he was advised to travel. During his absence, his place in the College was supplied by Thomas Byrd – son of the celebrated William Byrd. At the expiration of a year he returned to England with recruited health, and resumed his official duties…. Bull resigned his Gresham Professorship – for what reason does not appear: as he did not quit England till several years afterwards… Bull was quite poor and made numerous petitions for money to Queen Elizabeth. The Gresham Chair, with free accommodation and a regular salary, was therefore, a most welcome appointment. Scant information is known about Bull’s university career but, as a member of the Chapel Royal and a musician of some standing, he did not need to attend matriculation at Cambridge. Together with the fact that he did not need to reside in Cambridge to take a music degree, this may account for Bull’s dispensation to lecture only in English, the language in which he conducted the majority of his professional life. We now know that impending fatherhood and marriage, in that order, meant that Bull had to resign the Gresham Chair, leaving him to find new lodgings and income. Oliver Neighbour, who assesses Bull’s compositional output in the latest Grove, suggests that his music was of most interest to historians, most of it remaining unpublished till the appearance of the Musica Britannica series, which began in the 1950s.

That implied scarcity does not apply in the case of Bull’s most famous verse anthem for Epiphany, Almighty God, which by the leading of a star, aka the Stare Anthem. Occurring in 89 manuscript sources, it was by some margin one of the most widely distributed vocal works of the period.

Organ part from a manuscript dated 1620 held at Durham Cathedral Library.

The anthem’s first appearance in print was in Boyce’s Cathedral Music (1773) where it appears with different words O Lord my God by theologian and composer Henry Aldrich (1648-1710), famous for having adapted Palestrina and Carissimi to English words. Since that date, the anthem has appeared (with the intended words) in almost every printed compilation of Tudor and Jacobean choral music and is a favourite in the repertoire of most choirs. Its elegant succession of contrapuntal verses and homophonic choruses epitomise the verse anthem style, a typical product of that close mingling of musicians and authors in London, which then had a population of around 500,000. At one point, Byrd, Bull and even Shakespeare were living in the same parish of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, now EC3. Composers associated with the Chapel Royal at the time wrote in a similar vein but Bull displays a particular affinity and skill for writing effortlessly in canons. In the Starre Anthem, they draw our full attention and carry our voices along with words from the Book of Common Prayer towards the promise of everlasting life, represented by a thrilling sequence of ascending, overlapping scales: “one of the best last pages of the entire period” indeed. With all eyes on that mythical star, singers have no need to delve into the murkier details of John Bull’s life story.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s performance of the Starre anthem occurs midway through Gibbons 400, its upcoming concert at Christ Church, Chichester on July 5th, the star’s image reflected in the magnificent vaulted ceiling of Westminster Abbey, woven contrapuntally into Pru Bell-Davies’s heavenly concert poster. Click here for tickets.

Concert poster