Gibbons I Feign Not Friendship Where I Hate

The music of Orlando Gibbons represents the English response to radical changes that stemmed largely from Italy in the age of the birth of opera and a move away from the contrapunctal complexities of previous centuries. Whereas the Italian tended to write gradiose and radical works such of those by Monteverdi, the English tended to write music that was stylistically old-fashioned by the standards of the times, unostentatious with its preference for the sounds of the viol consort that helped make it so intimately poetic and evocative.