Biography
Early in his career as a chorister at Exeter Cathedral, Locke gained acquaintance with Gibbons and may have encountered Prince Charles as well. Evidence also suggests time spent in the Netherlands alongside royalist troops before their 1651 return to England. Masques and operas soon became his principal fields, commencing just two years after that homecoming through close collaboration with Gibbons. Among the first such pieces were “Cupid and Death” and “The Siege of Rhodes.” By 1662 he had been appointed organist to the Queen, yet he kept supplying music for the theater. Beyond these dramatic scores, Locke produced chamber music whose influence on Purcell is widely acknowledged; the instrumental works are marked by rhythmic variety, robust and demanding melodic contours, and harmonic invention that reveal a master craftsman. Every genre he touched bears witness to the same technical assurance. His most celebrated compositions remain “For His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts” and the treatise “Melothesia,” which he assembled and introduced with the earliest English guidance on realizing figured bass.