Keeping it in the family

Christopher Gibbons (1615-76)

This month we celebrate the 350th anniversary of Christopher Gibbons, who died at Westminster on 20 October 1676 aged 61, and is buried in the Abbey cloisters.

The name doubtless has a familiar ring, although few will know much more than the oft-repeated text-book epithet ‘…the son of…’ Tragically, the great Orlando Gibbons died when his son Christopher was only nine; Christopher’s mother would pass away some thirteen months on, leaving him double orphaned a month before his eleventh birthday.

The Composing Gene

Extensive genetic studies carried out at the University of Helsinki have determined that composing is linked to genes ‘in a certain part of chromosome four’. One might imagine, then, that the ‘composing gene’ is something we perhaps ought to see rather more of.

Yet, very seldom on British soil can we note a family succession of composers. More likely we think of families of performers, sometimes with composers in them, such as the Purcells: Henry Sr and Henry Jr, and Daniel, whose relationship to the Henrys is not completely understood; Thomas likewise. There are the Linleys of Bath, likewise father and son, and here, notably, a daughter. Then we have the Wesleys and the Webbes.

Musician-Families

Any complete picture of British musician-families is skewed by focussing solely on composing, and, by rights, the work and influence of players, teachers, planners, directors, and arrangers must also be noted. History is chock-full of generations of musicians working in the service of theatre, concert hall or church, or under the patronage of royalty and nobility. In Britain we see quite a roster of familial lines: the Broadwoods and Willises, the Booseys & the Hawkes, to name but the smallest handful.

The Gibbons family can very well be seen in this light. Here the composing gene was active in at least four family members: brothers Orlando, Ellis, and Edward, along with Christopher, to which the name of William can also be added, Christopher’s grandfather, whose entire career was as a professional musician. Then there is the mysterious Richard Gibbons, composer of several highly competent pieces of consort music, but about whom very little more is known.

Sitting in the shadows

Sadly, Christopher’s memory will forever be hampered, wedged between being the son of a famous father and the teacher of a famous pupil. There will be many that say Christopher Gibbons’ compositions are ‘nothing compared to’ Orlando’s or Purcell’s. Apples and Pears maybe, but it is important to see Gibbons in the context of having worked through a period of great transition.

Opinions aside, he is also poorly served in the annals of history, again through no fault of his own. We know that much has been lost: at least a hundred string fantazias, for instance.

Stellar career

As a result, his ‘official’ biography remains slight: Chapel Royal chorister - probably; organist of Winchester Cathedral - certainly, until the Parliamentarians removed the need for such a post; organist at St John’s College, Cambridge - seemingly for a single term - reason the same; a Royalist soldier; one of Playford’s ‘many excellent and able Masters’.

Piecing together the gaps is a long and exacting process. He was important enough for his fame to be celebrated by diarists Evelyn and Pepys. Come the Restoration, with thirty years’ professional life behind him, Gibbons found himself propelled into the realm’s premier musical roles:

• Organist of Westminster Abbey; for a time also Master of the Choristers;

• Senior Organist of the Chapel Royal;

• responsible, with Captain Henry Cooke, for kickstarting the Anglican Choral Tradition;

• Charles II’s Private Organist;

• made Doctor of Music at Oxford University;

• Master to John Blow, Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke;

• influence on the musical education of Pelham Humphrey, and on a succession of cathedral organists.

Opera, Chamber Music, Church Music

Christopher Gibbons stood at the forefront of English Opera. He directed Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, known to be the first English Opera, which incidentally featured Catherine Coleman, England's first professional actress. His were some of the very first ventures in England into the Violin Sonata and the Trio Sonata. He left us the first-dated work in Court Ode style, and the earliest masque where both the libretto and score have survived.

Sewing the seeds of renewal for the great Anglican Choral Tradition, he is responsible for the development of Anglican Chant; likewise, the modern British organ, as admired by Purcell, Blow, Handel, even Mendelssohn, and serving as the model exported to every corner of an emerging empire.

It is no underestimation, then, that Gibbons’ influence was a significant contributor to the very soundscape of Britain.

As a composer, some of the most famous Restoration anthems, long since assumed to be by Purcell, have been newly assessed to be the work of Christopher Gibbons.

His compositional magnum opus, the ‘Oxford Act’ of 1664, was recently reconstructed for a concert this past May - 362 years after its premiere - at St Clement Danes in the Strand, the church where Gibbons worshipped, was married, and where his five children were baptised. The 25-minute work stands monument to his composing genius. Alongside Italianate instrumental dances, motets, and no fewer than three hallelujah choruses, at the centre of this multi-movement work sits Gibbons’ magnificent test piece for the award of an Oxford Doctorate: his eight-voice full anthem ‘Not unto us, O Lord’, truly a masterpiece of expression and polyphonic control.

Legacy

By rights, Christopher’s own sons will have possessed a strong fourth chromosome. But, in an age of plagues and pestilence, sadly his boys did not survive into adulthood; as for his daughters…well, society was altogether a different place.

As we celebrate Christopher Gibbons’ 350th anniversary this month, it would be good to take stock, not just of a comparatively slim catalogue of surviving compositions, but to consider this figure’s influence on various genres, his work on the development of instruments and of playing styles, and to recall an outstanding legacy that inspired the torchbearers of musical culture in Early Modern Britain.