Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians.(Review)

Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians. By John Harley. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1999. [x, 341 p. ISBN 1-84014-209-X. $78.95.]

Orlando Gibbons has not been the subject of a full-length study since Edmund H. Fellowes's Orlando Gibbons: A Short Account of His Life and Work was published in 1925 ([Oxford: Clarendon Press]; 2d ed. published as Orlando Gibbons and His Family: The Last of the Tudor School of Musicians [London: Oxford University Press, 1951]), so the appearance of John Harley's Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians is most welcome. Harley's contribution resembles his recent William Byrd: Genthleman of the Chapel Royal (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 1997) in its thorough presentation of documents and other data. Harley also provides the most complete examination currently available of the lives of Gibbons family members, from Orlando's grandfather Richard to his son Christopher. Especially noteworthy is Harley's untangling of references to Ellis and Edward Gibbons, Orlando's brothers. Both names are mentioned in seventeenth-century documents but have often been confused, and here Harley's careful consideration of the available data is most helpful. He discusses Christopher Gibbons as well, but little new information is available on the life of this influential Restoration organist, and Harley offers few new thoughts on his music.

Like William Byrd: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, the present volume comprises two main sections covering Orlando Gibbons's life and music respectively. Other Gibbons family members, such as Christopher, are dealt with separately, but in much less detail and with life and music addressed in one rather than two parts. In his biographical section on Orlando, the author occasionally gets sidetracked, devoting considerable discussion to information only marginally related to the topic at hand. An example is the discussion of the keyboard collection Parthenia; the engraver, William Hole, and his possible relation, Robert Hole (connected with the publication of Parthenia In-Violata) are the subject of several pages containing data that might better have been left in footnotes. By contrast, an important issue in the Parthenia discussion is addressed in a single sentence on pages 48-49, where Harley mentions Thurston Dart's suggestion that Gibbons himself may have edited the volume. Perhaps Harley devotes little spa ce to this possibility because it cannot be verified, but the entire Parthenia discussion, with much information on the Holes and little on this intriguing hypothesis, seems unbalanced.

On the other hand, comments and data in footnotes might sometimes have been better placed in the text itself, such as data indicating that Gibbons ...