Thomas Bullis

Thomas Bullis, known in the repertoires as Thomas Bullis (ii) to distinguish him from his namesake father, was an English organist and composer born in Ely around the late 1650s. His life was spent almost entirely at the cathedral of that city, where the records place him as a regular figure in the musical life of the late Stuart period, at the transition between the earlier Anglican tradition and the style that would come with the following generation.

As a boy he was a chorister under the direction of John Ferrabosco and, as an adult, he held a lay clerk's post with an annual salary of ten pounds from 1677 until his death in 1712. Between 1677 and 1682 he probably acted as organist during Ferrabosco's last illness, and after Ferrabosco's death he came to hold the post on an interim basis. Around 1684, when the chapter allowed James Hawkins to devote part of the week to teaching music in Bury St Edmunds, Bullis and his father seem to have assumed the duties of organist and informer, although it is not known with certainty whether this became fully the case. Unlike his father, who also served as churchwarden of the parish of the Holy Trinity in Ely, Bullis probably devoted himself exclusively to music.

His surviving output is modest: three liturgical services and seven anthems, only some of which survive complete. The most notable is O clap your hands together, transmitted in score in the Ely manuscripts, and his style is clearly more modern than that of his father, closer to that of James Hawkins. His importance lies chiefly in documenting the musical continuity of Ely Cathedral as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth.