Professor Peter Williams, Bach Scholar and a Vice President of the RCO, has passed away, appropriately around midnight just before Bach’s birthday, the 21st March. Official tributes will of course be paid elsewhere, but I would like to remember a study day which I attended as a very newbie organist, in which his sharp, questioning intelligence, combined with great authority, were powerfully in evidence.

RCO members, students and their families filled Southwark Cathedral on Saturday for the 2016 Conferment of Diplomas.

If you are reading this, then you have reached iRCO, an innovative virtual campus from the Royal College of Organists, designed to provide easy access to learning, research and general information for organists and choral directors.

The RCO received more than 900 responses to its 2015 survey, providing a unique insight into the musical life of organists and choral directors. The importance of the organ and choral music in religious worship was strongly emphasised throughout the responses.

Famously prickly, irascible, caring and encouraging, Dr Bernard Rose was a one-off, and for over five decades a living legend in the UK’s choirmaster world.

Viscount Classical Organs offers free membership of the Royal College of Organists to new and recent customers.

The initiative means that anyone buying a Viscount organ for home practice will receive a year’s free membership of the RCO.

by James Parsons ‘Amazing’ – ‘brilliant’ – ‘such fun’  – ‘I’m so glad I came’  Emily Keeling-Paglia (age 11) texts home from Bristol. She was on the RCO Academy’s Find Your Feet! and Build Your Skills! in Bristol along with 14 other young musicians who had decided to spend three days of their October half-term last […]

by Simon Williams Oxford University’s Access and Outreach promoted the Organ Scholarships for All day on 3 November 2015 to show that organ scholarships can be within reach even for those teenagers who come to organ playing relatively late in the school days, and to raise awareness of organ scholarships in general among state schools. Hosted […]

by Morwenna Brett As the RCO has said many times before, no other instrument seems quite able to embrace and sum up the public mood like the organ.  At moments of high emotion, whether personal or public, the organ speaks in a way few instruments can. The death of David Bowie on Sunday 10th January saddened […]