Terence Charlston looks at recent editions from the newly founded publisher Lyrebird Music.  In this review article he not only reacts to the editorial mission and accomplishment but also stimulates our engagement as keyboard players with the interpretative challenges of the virginalist repertoire.

David Baker describes how music at Halifax Parish Church had been in decline until twenty-seven-year-old John Varley Roberts was appointed in late 1868, and transformed the choir at Halifax from a small, mixed group of voices up in the west gallery with an outmoded organ to a choral establishment of some seventy robed male singers in the chancel, accompanied by a four-manual instrument.

Richard Brasier explains how Beethoven’s early experiences with the organ as a church musician gradually helped to transform piano technique during the early-Romantic period, in a discussion of his new edition of Beethoven’s works for the organ and for Flötenuhr, published by Verlag Dohn in 2020.

The clear division of Bach’s keyboard works into those for organ and those for clavier is one that is more evident to modern editors than it probably was to performers in eighteenth-century Germany.  Francis Knights discusses a few works that appear to fall into neither camp, and the evidence they provide for the particular instrument they may have been played on.

Tom Bell uses W. T. Best’s editions of Bach to open a window into the world of a Victorian musician, and to explore nineteenth-century performance practice. 

The most substantial of Purcell’s organ works, the Voluntary for Double Organ has been described as ‘an exuberant product of the English Baroque’.  This paper by Desmond Hunter reviews aspects of the notation and considers several issues concerning the work’s performance, set against the background of a more general discussion of the genre.

The French Revolution was both destructive and creative, and the story of the organ during the revolutionary decade was one of continuity and of change. Andrew Cantrill-Fenwick discusses a time when organ culture was in thrall to political forces, in this article from the RCO Journal of 2020/2021.

The 2020/2021 edition of the College’s research publication, The Journal of the Royal College of Organists, can be downloaded here as a complete edition.

Details about online access to The American Organist journal, for RCO Members who are Affiliate Members of the AGO.