From private keyboards to the English voluntary

Byrd, Bull, Gibbons and Tomkins treated the keyboard as an orchestra in miniature. Grounds, pavans, galliards, fantasias and variation sets reveal a school at once contrapuntal and brilliantly tactile; the surviving manuscripts preserve both celebrated and obscure voices.

After the Restoration, the musical institutions of court, chapel and theatre were rebuilt. Blow and Purcell wrote keyboard music within a broader world of stage and sacred music, while the voluntary developed as a flexible form for organists.

Organs increasingly sounded beyond the liturgy—in concert rooms, gardens and charitable institutions. John Stanley's voluntaries belong to this public culture and preserve the contrast between a slow opening and a more animated second movement.