This is the record of John

One of the finest keyboard players and composers of his age, Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) helped shepherd English music from the late Renaissance into the beginnings of Baroque style. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in his verse anthems—a genre later developed by Henry Purcell and John Blow. This Is the Record of John is a classic example, alternating passages for tenor soloist with those for full, five-part chorus. Commissioned by William Laud, president of St John’s College, Oxford, the anthem tells the story of the college’s patron saint, John the Baptist. Accompanied by organ or viol consort, each of the three verses opens with the soloist, whose more freely virtuosic music is answered by the chorus. The text’s many questions are set with rhetorical flair, giving energy to an anthem whose tension is only released in the revelation of John’s true identity in the expansive final section: “I am the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.”