John Bull is one of those composers known more for certain salacious and possibly apocryphal details of his life than for his music -- the Archbishop of Canterbury is said to have remarked that "the man hath more music than honesty and is as famous for marring of virginity as he is for fingering of organs and virginals" (which merely makes one wonder who was fingering what). But he may have met his musical match in the American-Dutch harpsichordist Kathryn Cok, an adventurous soul who has recorded everything from ...
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John Bull is one of those composers known more for certain salacious and possibly apocryphal details of his life than for his music -- the Archbishop of Canterbury is said to have remarked that "the man hath more music than honesty and is as famous for marring of virginity as he is for fingering of organs and virginals" (which merely makes one wonder who was fingering what). But he may have met his musical match in the American-Dutch harpsichordist Kathryn Cok, an adventurous soul who has recorded everything from Renaissance music to Stephen Foster. Cok in her notes (given in English and Dutch) identifies Bull in relation to late Renaissance keyboard music as a composer who "was consistently pushing the borders in what was then quite a conservative genre." Bull broke through the boundaries of keyboard music's slowly evolving dance, contrapuntal, and variation (or "division") forms with intense chromaticism, virtuoso technical complexities, and a certain dramatic flair that sets him quite far apart from...
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