Orlando Gibbons Biography - A Very Quick Guide

Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) was an English composer and organist, widely regarded as one of the final major figures of the English polyphonic tradition. Born in Oxford into a prominent musical family, he sang as a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1596 to 1599 and entered the university in 1598. In 1603 he joined the Chapel Royal, later becoming its organist, a position he held for the rest of his life. Gibbons also served as a royal keyboard musician from 1619, received an honorary doctorate in music from Oxford in 1622, and became organist of Westminster Abbey the following year. He died in 1625 while accompanying Charles I to Dover to meet his bride, Henrietta Maria.

Gibbons’s finest works include his full anthems, four-part “little” anthems, and the madrigals collected in Madrigals and Motetts of 5 Parts (1612), which display a refined mastery of late polyphonic style. The collection contains celebrated pieces such as The Silver Swan and “What Is Our Life?” His earlier Fantasies in Three Parts Compos’d for Viols (c. 1610) is thought to be the first English music printed from engraved copperplates. Renowned in his lifetime as both an organist and virginalist, Gibbons published keyboard works in Parthenia (c. 1612), and more than forty additional pieces survive in manuscript.