The ‘verse anthem’ is a form peculiar to English music, conceived in the heat of the English Reformation. Many of the leading composers of the period up the the Restoration contributed to a large body of works, of which only a fraction is heard today outside the world of Anglican choirs. Having directed a project last year to make the first complete recording of a significant body of this music – the consort anthems of Orlando Gibbons, which lie at the centre of this period – I want to take this further by researching where the verse anthem came from and where it had had reached by the time of the Restoration.
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