(b Canterbury, bap. 20 Sept 1610; d London, 26 Nov 1681). English cathedral singer and music copyist. He was trained as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1617/18–24) and probably left Canterbury soon after his voice changed. It seems likely that sometime during the 1630s he moved to Cambridge, where he became acquainted with the music patron Sir Christopher Hatton and his musicians and copyists, in particular George Jeffreys and John Lilly. During the 1630s Bing took holy orders, and in 1640 or 1641 he was appointed as a minor canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. Among Bing’s colleagues at St Paul’s were John Barnard and John Woodington (also a court violinist). The association between Barnard, Bing and Woodington is apparent in a number of surviving manuscripts copied by Bing in the late 1630s and early 1640s, the most important of which are the sets of viol consort music in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, copied in conjunction with Lilly whilst working under the patronage of Hatton.
Bing’s appointment as minor canon unfortunately coincided with the king’s forced withdrawal from London and the start of the Civil War. He left St Paul’s sometime after midsummer 1642 and probably joined the king’s supporters in Oxford. There he would have been reunited with Hatton and Jeffreys. It appears that Hatton, as Comptroller of the King’s Household, assumed responsibility for the music at the Oxford court, and surviving manuscripts suggest that Bing was closely involved. Oxford yielded to parliamentarian forces on 20 June 1646 and Bing probably took advantage of the surrender terms to return to his former employment at St Paul’s. In April 1649, however, the act of parliament abolishing ‘Deans, Deans and Chapters, Canons, Prebends, and other Offices’ and ordering the sale of ecclesiastical land and property deprived Bing of both his job and his home. Thereafter, like many redundant church and court musicians during the Commonwealth, he earned his living as a teacher.
Following the Restoration, Bing was appointed senior cardinal at St Paul’s, as well as warden of the College of Minor Canons (1660–62). After the Fire of London (1666), which destroyed the cathedral, Bing was appointed senior vicar-choral at Lincoln Cathedral, where he stayed until early 1672. It is from this period that we have the first evidence of his Restoration liturgical-copying activities: the set of eight books now known as the Bing-Gostling Partbooks (GB-Y M 1 S). It is probable that they were begun at Lincoln in the late 1660s, but the majority of pieces appear to have been added in the 1670s following Bing’s appointment as lay vicar at Westminster Abbey (on 1 April 1672). Bing also renewed his connections with St Paul’s, and by midsummer 1672 his signatures resume in the minor canons’ accounts. As a lay vicar at Westminster Abbey in the late 1670s, Bing was a colleague of Henry Purcell and copied a number of the composer’s early anthems. His close associations with the country’s best musicians and most influential music patrons for over 50 years make Bing one of the most important 17th-century English music copyists yet identified.
P. Willetts: ‘Stephen Bing: a Forgotten Violist’, Chelys, xviii (1989), 3–17
S. Boyer and J.P. Wainwright: ‘From Barnard to Purcell: the Copying Activities of Stephen Bing’, EMc, xxiii (1995), 620–48
J.P. Wainwright: ‘The Christ Church Viol-Consort Manuscripts Reconsidered’, John Jenkins and his Time: Studies in English Consort Music, ed. A. Ashbee and P. Holman (Oxford, 1996), 189–241
J.P. Wainwright: Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England: Christopher, First Baron Hatton (1605–1670) (Aldershot, 1997)
JONATHAN WAINWRIGHT