My Days is a 2012 work by Nico Muhly, written for The Hilliard Ensemble & Fretwork and commissioned by Wigmore Hall. It sets the same words as Orlando Gibbons’ anthem ‘Behold, thou hast made my days’, framing a setting of the autopsy report on Gibbons’ death on 5th June 1625. There was an autopsy report because he was accompanying King Charles, who went to Canterbury to greet his new wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, and they were fearful that Gibbons may have succumbed to the plague. But upon opening his skull, they saw that he had suffered a brain haemorrhage. 

We will record the work - never recorded before - with Iestyn Davies, Sam Boden, Hugo Hymas & Jimmy Holliday, alongside Gibbons’s great viol-consort music, for release during the 400th anniversary of his death in 2025. The recording will be followed by a concert performance in Saffron Hall.