Orlando Gibbons's The Cries of London

Throughout September, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates the music of 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century England.


https://youtu.be/nm8RFLPC9oU

https://youtu.be/mAahpO1Kw6Q

Orlando Gibbons (bap. 25 December 1583–5 June 1625) was an English composer, virginalist, and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods. He was one of the leading composers in the England at that time. Although he died quite young (he was just 41), he composed a large quantity of music, for keyboards, viols, church music, and many madrigals.

In the London of the sixteenth century, the cries of the street vendor, offering food, services such as knife grinding, rat-killing, and chimney sweeping, or even merely calling attention to lost belongings, were part of everyday life. Gibbons's attempt to collect this everyday ephemera into a musical setting, The Cries of London, for SATTB choir and viol consort, was not a one-off stroke of genius but part of a small repertoire of such pieces produced within a rather specific time frame, namely, 1605 to 1615. (The text can be found here: http://www1.cpdl.org/…/The_cries_of_London_(Orlando_Gibbons).)

An interesting point to note is that the viol consort music is based on a sacred tune, "In Nomine," a common practice of the time, while the voices are humorous and completely secular. Todd McComb says, "[Gibbons's] strongly evocative 'Cries of London' is one of the most peculiar and strangely effective consort songs of the period."

My classical music post for today is Orlando Gibbons's The Cries of London.

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