Orlando Gibbons, Keyboard Music, and the Beginnings of the Baroque: New Considerations of a Musical Style

Résumé By examining abstract instrumental works, I wish to propose that an essential aspect of the new style known today as “Baroque” is the adoption of a different tonal language that can be found in English music of the early years of the century. This is, in itself, not a new idea, and that there is a move to a two-mode (major/ minor) system during the course of the seventeenth century is not an issue of great debate, but how early it begins and the impetus for the change is less sure. Moreover, it is rarely considered as a harbinger of a new style, that of beginning the Baroque. I will demonstrate that Orlando Gibbons’s abstract keyboard music resonated with contemporary English musicians, was described by amateurs as well as professionals, and flourished during the tumultuous years of the first half of the century, becoming the dominant musical language of Baroque instrumental music. This is not to say that Gibbons is the only composer who experimented with new ways of organizing music or that England is the only place where such innovation can be located. The lack of centering the discussion on any place except Italy, however, has misguided our current understanding of the period and has subsequently yielded a view of “Baroque” that does not acknowledge concurrent developments in other places. By disengaging from the text, we are able to comprehend better the methods by which seventeenth-century composers dealt with how to structure a non-texted composition, how to lengthen the work, what aspects to develop, and along what lines. The demands instrumental composition made on an existing musical language fundamentally conceived as a vehicle for text ultimately led to the disintegration of older processes and the crystallization of new ones. The keyboard fantasias of Gibbons serve as a viable test case since they were unquestionably influential, being copied and performed continually from the time they were created to the Restoration.