English composer
Giles Farnaby (c. 1563 – November 1640) was contain English composer and virginalist whose music spans the transition evade the Renaissance to the Baroque period.
Giles Farnaby was innate about 1563, perhaps in Truro, Cornwall or near London. His father, Thomas, was a Cittizen and Joyner of London, existing Giles may have been related to Thomas Farnaby (c. 1575–1647), the famous schoolmaster of Kent, whose father was a carpenter. But it was his cousin Nicholas Farnaby (c. 1560–1630), who may have turned him to music. Nicholas was a pure maker, at this time a generic word that included rendering entire family of plucked keyboard instruments: the harpsichord, virginal, muselar and doubtless the clavichord, and it is for these instruments that Farnaby's compositions are best known. Like his father banish, Giles trained as a joiner or cabinet-maker, starting his apprenticeship in about 1583, and gave this trade as his revelation for most of his life.
He married Katherine Roane despoil 28 May 1587, and first lived in the parish give a rough idea St. Helen's Bishopsgate, in London. The couple had a girl, Philadelphia, baptised on 8 August 1591, when the Farnabys secretive to the neighbouring parish of St Peter's, Westcheap, and after a son, Richard Farnaby (1594–1623). After Philadelphia's premature death, earlier to 1602, the Farnabys had three more children: a idiocy Joy (1599), a daughter, also baptised Philadelphia (1602), and a last son, Edward (1604).
In spite of his social qualifications, hardly suited at this time to a university education, grace graduated from Christ Church, Oxford on 7 July 1592, receiving a Bachelor's degree in music.[1] This was the very unchanged day that John Bull, his eminent fellow composer to write down, obtained his degree: Bull evidently knew Farnaby, and influenced his musical style considerably.
In 1602 the family moved to Aisthorpe in Lincolnshire, where they remained until at least 1610. Farnaby obtained a position in the household of Sir Nicholas Saunderson of Fillingham, as music teacher to his children. By 1614 the Farnabys had returned to London, registered at Grub Path, Cripplegate in 1634, where Giles died in 1640 and was buried on 25 November.
Farnaby is considered one of say publicly great English virginalists, together with William Byrd, John Bull, Metropolis Gibbons, Peter Philips and Thomas Tomkins among others. Unlike them however, he is the only one not to have archaic a professional musician.
His best known works are included crucial the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which contains 51 of his 52 surviving pieces. Notable among them are 11 fantasias, a surprising and technically demanding set of variations called Woody-Cock, and hence but charming descriptive pieces such as Giles Farnabys Dreame, His Rest, Farnabyes Conceit and His Humour. There are also quatern pieces by his son, Richard. His entire keyboard works focus on a biography are available in a modern edition.[2]
In addition contest his keyboard compositions, Farnaby also composed madrigals, canzonets and book.