Ellis Gibbons was a composer and one of the older brothers of Orlando Gibbons

Orlando Gibbons

Orlando Gibbons was an English composer, virginalist and organist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods...

.

His father William was one of the Oxford town waits

WAITS

WAITS was a heavily-modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation's Monitor operating system for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 mainframe computers, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory up until 1990; the mainframe computer it ran on also went by the name of "SAIL".There was never an...

, but moved to Cambridge between the birth and christening of Orlando. Ellis' older brother Edward Gibbons (1568–1650) became master of the choristers at Cambridge.

Ellis Gibbons was evidently counted as having promise by his contemporaries, at the age of 28 he became the only composer other than the editor Thomas Morley

Thomas Morley

Thomas Morley was an English composer, theorist, editor and organist of the Renaissance, and the foremost member of the English Madrigal School. He was the most famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England and an organist at St Paul's Cathedral...

 himself to contribute two madrigals to The Triumphs of Oriana

The Triumphs of Oriana

The Triumphs of Oriana is a book of English madrigals, compiled and published in 1601 by Thomas Morley, which first edition has 25 pieces by 23 composers . It was said to have been made in the honour of Queen Elizabeth I...

(1601).

Ellis Gibbons was never, and could not have been, organist of Salisbury cathedral as is recorded in some Georgian reference works.