Gibbons 400: a celebration of “stately melody, sonorous harmony and religious solemnity”

June 5th marks the anniversary of the death of Orlando Gibbons on Whit Sunday 1625. This anniversary being the quartercentenary, commemorations are on a scale much greater than the customary evensong at King’s College Cambridge. Most cathedrals in England will be doing the same at this time, including a live broadcast of BBC Choral Evensong from Canterbury on June 4th. His music will be honoured internationally in religious locations from New Zealand to the United States. Special concerts devoted to Gibbons too, including Portsmouth Baroque Choir with Binsted Viols at Christ Church, Chichester as part of the Festival of Chichester on July 5th that will feature a selection of his verse and full anthems alongside the work of some of his contemporaries. The use of viols as well as organ for accompaniment follows a trend that acknowledges the historic practice of performing this music in domestic and private chapel venues as well as in cathedrals. At the forefront of that trend is the viol consort, Fretwork and they, with a group of five solo singers. will be touring a programme My Days: Gibbons and Nico Muhly starting on June 5th at the Wigmore Hall. On cue for this anniversary and this particular tour, a companion album has been released by Signum Classics, including a contemporary piece, My Days, written in homage to Gibbons by Nico Muhly.

 

 

Nico Muhly (b. 1981 in Vermont) joins a list of North American admirers of Gibbons that included the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould who famously compared the importance of Gibbons, his favourite composer, to Schubert and Webern. Muhly studied and performed English Renaissance music as a child chorister and developed a special attachment to the sound of the Hilliard Ensemble and Fretwork. Combining those influences therefore came naturally to Muhly when the commission arrived in 2012 from the Wigmore Hall and Fretwork to compose a homage to Gibbons that would draw on the talents of those two groups. My days, is scored for countertenor, 2 tenors, 1 bass, 2 treble viols, tenor viol and 2 7-string bass viols. The text is derived from Psalm 39, which Gibbons himself set in 1618 for the funeral of Anthony Maxey, Dean of Windsor. My days also sets the semi-anonymous account of Gibbons’s autopsy. Muhly writes in the preface to the score: “one of the most thrilling things about the sound of violas da gamba playing together is the sense of their phrasing being derived from vocal music, but made, somehow, electric and ecstatic through ornamentation and the friction of the strings”. Clear instructions are given to the singers and string players: sotto voce, almost as if giving a pitch before the piece begins / suddenly a different colour/ severe, stylised.

🔊 Nico Muhly. My days (radio mix) The full work is available on Spotify.

What better way to honour a composer and their age than to write a new work that celebrates them and creates a cultural bridge across the centuries? To me, this piece is as evocative of Gibbons and the musical sounds of his time as any attempt at period performance and goes far beyond reverential pastiche.¹ Music can do this without performers striving to replicate historical sound exactly, so how important is it, in the absence of clear instructions in the score such as dynamics and expression marks, to strive for best, historically-informed practice when it comes to performing this particular music? Seventy years of recorded performances show us that options, once limited to a typical cathedral choir sound, have become more varied, as my comparison, below, of a small selection of recordings reveals.

A trap needs to be avoided: the “self-fulfilling source base, or judging history by what survives and remains on display” ². To paraphrase Ada Palmer’s explanation of this trap in relation to music, as children when learning what classical music is, we’re played famous pieces of music, typically written between 1600 and 1900, and, surprise, when we grow up and hear music in concert halls or on a playback device our ears know what to like and how it should be performed. In the case of music from 400 years ago, intervening tastes and judgements distort our understanding. Just because cathedral choirs have been singing Byrd and Gibbons for centuries in a predictable way does not mean that their way is necessarily the best, nor even the most appropriate. But it’s hard to believe a researcher who suddenly claims, no, you’ve been getting that all wrong.

If wrong, what can an amateur chamber choir do about it? Isn’t it better to rely on the strengths of the performers and the circumstances of the venue? Two factors in particular will shape the performance that Portsmouth Baroque Choir will give in July. Firstly, the space itself, a modern church interior with little reverberation that allows very close proximity of the performers to the audience. That will help clarify the sung texts. Secondly, the preferred tuning of Binsted Viols. Whereas Fretwork tune to A=466, Binsted Viols opt for the more widely favoured A=415. In order to stay close to the printed pitch of the editions, the viol parts will be transposed up a fourth and down a semitone, leaving the choir singing a semitone above what is printed – mercifully short of the practice, now discouraged, of singing this kind of music up a minor third! ³

One can say with confidence that the future for the music of Orlando Gibbons and his contemporaries as the 400th anniversary of his death ticks by, is more healthy and secure than ever, backed by authoritative performing editions, regular live performances, sound recordings, workshops, scholarly research and online resources. ⁴ But such a future was unlikely at the time of Gibbons’s sudden and somewhat sensational death in Canterbury, regardless of his fame. Religious and political changes during and just after Gibbons’s lifetime posed a real threat to performance and resources.  The way the music was reproduced and kept, in manuscript as separate parts, meant that some of those parts were bound to go missing. Early printed compilations had shortcomings in terms of print quality and inclusion. For the best part of two centuries, very little survived even in the cathedral repertoire, as Richard Turbet explains:

Orlando Gibbon’s music, like that of all the Tudors, steadily fell out of favour after his death, except for a number of anthems and his Short Service which remained in the repertory of the cathedral choirs. A single token madrigal The Silver Swan kept his name alive in secular anthologies, The early music revival in England during the 1840s was kind to Gibbons, and thereafter all types of his music came into the public domain and remained there. Two commemorations, 1907 and 1925, stimulated further publications, so that by the time of his tercentenary in 1925, effectively his entire known output was available in print, some of it in alternative versions. ⁵

Fig 1 mapping of the eleven anthems to be sung by Portsmouth Baroque Choir onto the succession of cathedral collections 1625-1925, plus an indication in column 3 of how widespread each of the pieces was in manuscript form, Bull’s ‘Starre Anthem’ and Byrd’s ‘Christ rising’ being the most widely distributed. The paucity of verse anthems in Barnard is possibly due to verses becoming politically rather than religiously charged in revolutionary times.

Composer	Work	MSS	Barnard	Clifford	Boyce	Ouseley	TCM
Gibbons	O all true faithful hearts	1					+
Gibbons	This is the record of John	37		+		+	+
Amner	O ye little flock	20
Gibbons	Behold, I bring you glad tidings	59	+	+		+	+
Bull	Almighty God, who by the leading of a star	89		+	+		+
Weelkes	Hosanna to the son of David	17
Byrd	Christ rising	71	+	+			+
Gibbons	We praise thee O Father	40				+	+
Gibbons	O God the king of glory	17					+
Gibbons	O clap your hands	9			+		+
Gibbons	See, the word is incarnate	11				+	+

Key
Barnard = John Barnard. First Book of Selected Church Musick, 1641
Clifford = The Divine services and anthems usually sung in the cathedrals and collegiate choires in the Church of England collected by J. C[lifford], 1663
Boyce = William Boyce. Cathedral music: being a collection in score of the most valuable and useful compositions for that service, by the several early English masters of the last two hundred years, 1788.
Ouseley = Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley. A collection of the sacred compositions of Orlando Gibbons (of which the scores are not contained in Dr. Boyce’s Collection), 1873
TCM = Tudor Church Music, ed. Buck, Ramsbotham, Fellowes, Terry & Townsend Warner, 1922-29. In 10 volumes, of which vol. 4 is devoted to Gibbons.

John Harper also pointed out ⁶ that Gibbons’s reputation as a church composer rested on that small selection of pieces that had appeared in successive collections of “cathedral music stemming from Barnard and Boyce, broadened only by Ouseley’s edition (1893) and, later,in the Tudor Church Music series and adds that despite his professional engagements, Gibbons appears to have written less service music than any of his major contemporaries. Moreover, a surprising number of his anthems prove to have “domestic or occasional origins and were not intended for ‘quires and places where they sing’”. He mostly composed for the intimate acoustics of royal chapels, halls and chambers, modestly large rooms comparable to Oxford or Cambridge college chapels. ⁷

The association of verse anthems with cathedral music limited not only their availability but the stye in which they were performed and whereas the advent of recording technology tackled the availability issue it threw an interesting light on performance practice, to which we can now turn, looking at recordings of four of the anthems in Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s programme: Gibbons O clap your hands; O God the king of glory; Bull Almighty God, who by the leading of a star; and Gibbons See, see the word is incarnate.

The earliest commercial recordings of sacred music by Gibbons date from 1956, Boris Ord directing the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. This is their version of O clap your hands sounding very prim and proper in a processional four beats to the bar, the choir could just as well have been singing Stanford.

🔊Gibbons. O clap your hands. King’s College, Ord, 1956.

The same forces sound better, more transparent, in O God the King of Glory but although the massive crescendo towards the end is suitably glorious, one would hesitate to sit through this entire album as everything sounds much the same.

🔊Gibbons. O God the King of Glory. King’s College, Ord, 1956.

Similarly foggy (allowing for the recording quality of what is most likely a degraded copy of a copy from a lost original tape), this is a broadcast recording from June 1959 of John Bull’s Starre anthem featuring the choir and organ of Southwell Minster conducted by David Lumsden, again, not a good exampled to emulate seventy years on. The pace and phrasing are pedestrian, the words barely discernible, the tuning and vocal balance occasionally disconcerting. One assumes that heard live in the venue it would have sounded beautiful but that would only tell you more about the building than about Bull.

🔊Bull. Almighty God, who by the leading of a star. Southwell Minster, Lumsden, 1959.

Here’s another recording of the Bull, from forty years later by Consortium, a professional choir based in London and directed by Edward Barbieri. Also with organ accompaniment but better phrased and with more urgency appropriate to the star-led journey and with clear diction. Very pleasing to listen to with a dynamic gradient peaking towards the end that avoids those repeated, ascending scales becoming monotonous.

🔊 Bull. Almighty God, who by the leading of a star. Consortium, Barbieri, 1999.

Stepping back a decade, Red Byrd gave verse anthems a rustic treatment verging on folk singing, with very open vowel sounds. The words are very clear and the rhythmic articulation crisp, creating an electric performance, although mannered almost to the extent of self-parody. Who knows: did choirs inflect in this way in the Elizabethan Chapel Royal? Perhaps they did. Their rhetorical approach to singing the text has been taken up, with moderation, by some later choirs (see below).

🔊Gibbons. See, see, the word is incarnate. Red Byrd, 1990

Gentler and more orthodox by comparison, Jeremy Summerly, also recorded in the 1990s, directs the Oxford Camerata in a well-shaped and elegantly phrased O God the King of Glory.

🔊Gibbons, O God the king of glory. Oxford Camerata. Summerly. 1996

That same album from Oxford Camerata also contains, in my opinion, one of the best performances of See, the word is incarnate. This is one of the few texts that Gibbons set that is not from the Book of Common Prayer or Bible. The text, assigned to the Dean of Rochester, Godfrey Goodman, is a biblical paraphrase of life of Christ up to the Ascension. As such it is almost like Handel’s Messiah condensed into around seven minutes. Condensed, and at times congested if the tempo is too brisk, such as during the duet in canon at the words ‘The Law is cancelled, Jews and Gentiles all converted by the preaching of glad tidings of salvation’. Summerly adopts a slower tempo than most thereby avoiding verbal pile-ups and the narrative sounding breathless. 

🔊Gibbons. See, see the word is incarnate. Oxford Camerata, 1996.

Fast forward now to 2017 and Peter Harvey’s Magdalena Consort with Fretwork, part of the Orlando Gibbons Project under direction of William Hunt, and in which Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s musical director Malcolm Keeler had a supporting role. The viols transpose the sound from a cathedral interior to somewhere more intimate. Building on the preceding two examples from Oxford Camerata, the singing is gorgeous and the words crystal clear. The album In chains of gold, vol. 1: the English Pre-Restoration verse anthem was one of the Gramophone critics’ choices for album of the year in 2017 and Early Music Review described it as “the finest recording of this quintessentially English music that we are likely to have”.

🔊Gibbons. See, see the word is incarnate. Magdalena Consort with Fretwork, 2017

William Hunt explains the style of singing adopted for that recording:  ⁸
[the] whole style of delivery, drawing partly on the dramatic tradition of the Elizabethan stage consort song, would surely have been very different from that which was cultivated for the old choral polyphony. Obviously, the requirements that the text should from now on be in English, not Latin, and that the setting should be syllabic, rather than melismatic… were designed to make it readily understood. But it goes much further than that. In the phrase as if it were read without singing the word read refers not to the listener but to the performer, and implies a command of rhetorical declamation, the art of which was thoroughly taught in the reformed grammar schools. What we are dealing with must be a style of ‘speaking in song’ that is probably much closer to the ‘recitar cantando’ advocated by contemporary Italian theorists than the traditional Anglican way of presenting this music has led us to expect…. We are convinced that the all-purpose, blended choral style which has to fit Palestrina motets, Stainer anthems and romantic psalm-settings into the same choral evensong as a piece such as Gibbons’ highly dramatised ‘See, see, the Word is incarnate’ simply misses the point.

For me, the real deal is this combination of research and virtuoso performance but in case you think I’m discounting the cathedral approach entirely, earlier this year a selection of video recordings appeared on YouTube of Evensong performances from Trinity College, Cambridge directed by Steven Grahl. Women’s voices in the soprano and alto parts bring the sound closer to the SATB chamber choir sound and manage to convey the words with similar clarity to Red Byrd and the Magdalena Consort but without their exaggerated diction. The approach is respectful and has a gorgeous integrity and authenticity supported by the resonant college chapel acoustic. You might say that Steven Grahl has managed to obtain the best of both worlds!

🔊Gibbons See, see the word is incarnate. Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Grahl. Live February 4th, 2025

In the previous year those same forces video-recorded O clap your hands. The tempo is moderate, well-tuned to the acoustic that might otherwise swamp the detail. And at this pace, with an economy of gesture from Steven Grahl, the singers avoid getting over-excited by suddenly finding themselves singing something more rhythmical and joyful than is usual with this music.

🔊Gibbons. O clap your hands. Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Grahl. Live, May 2024

The importance of Orlando Gibbons was recognised in his lifetime. He was the most highly-regarded English musician of his generation, as the Dean of Westminster commented in 1624: “The organ was touched by the best finger of that age, Mr. Orlando Gibbons”. Numerous assessments over the last four centuries have only augmented his standing. A century before Glenn Gould declared Gibbons to be his favourite composer, John Bumpus and Thomas Lea Southgate summed up his music as follows:
It is impossible to examine Gibbons’s compositions for the Church without being struck with the great change which that composer wrought in our Cathedral music. “Gibbons… stood at the parting of the ways. Brought up with the strains of Tallis, Byrd, Tye and Merbecke, and other worthies of the old school ringing in his ears, he perceived that another world of music was opening; emotion and expression were destined to take the place of orderly, though cold counterpoint. This new feeling is reflected in his music, sacred and secular. On this foundation Gibbons built up a series of noble anthems, different from anything that had appeared before his time. It is exalted that flows along with stately melody, grand in its sonorous harmony, and impressive in its religious solemnity. ⁹

Southgate’s assessment of the music’s character is spot-on but his labelling of Gibbons as a musical revolutionary I think mistakenly embroils him in the late 19th-century squabbles over whether Brahms or Liszt was the more progressive. Also misleading was Ouseley’s assertion that Gibbons was “the English Palestrina”: in stature yes, but their circumstances and musical output differ, which is why choirs should not be singing Gibbons as if it were evolved Palestrina. Gibbons might have gone on to shape the next generation of composers had he not died so young. However, his son Christopher did pass on the baton: to Blow, Humfrey and Purcell.

More than a century after Ouseley, Southgate and Bumpus, we see Byrd as the more innovative composer, writing secretly for a possible reality, for a faith he hoped would one day return. Andrew Gant, choirmaster and composer at the Chapel Royal 2000-2013, highlights the comparison between Byrd and Gibbons:
Unlike Byrd, [Gibbons’s] musical personality was not one which found it necessary to constantly re-create form and technique. Rather, he was content to inherit an existing style and manner, and polish it until he achieved perfection. ¹⁰

To conclude, what makes a performance of a Gibbons anthem successful? We derive personal enjoyment from listening to recordings but being part of a live concert venue matters more, given the power, immediacy and community that comes with it. We are, after all, social beings. A well-delivered performance that reflects the “polished perfection” in the score is not primarily a system for conveying information, it is an excitement of curiosity.