The year 1976 brought the 25th Anniversary of the opening of the Royal Festival Hall, and to celebrate this the BBC commissioned a 20-minute work from Peter Racine Fricker for a concert of English music. Fricker chose to write a short single movement symphony, and as an FRCO, he decided to include an organ part. Gillian Weir was invited to be the soloist, and in this article from the RCO Journal of 2017 she describes the event, and also discusses the performance of a later concerto by Fricker, Laudi Concertati, which was dedicated to her.

Thierry Escaich’s compositional work is recognised the world over, and in acknowledgement of this he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France in 2013. He is the only composer of international stature today whose output contains a substantial place for the organ.

David Maw analyses Escaich’s writing for the organ in detail, with examples, in this article which originally appeared in the RCO Journal for 2017. Maw discusses Escaich’s creation of genres of writing of his own invention, along with the traditional concerto form; his use of improvisation and historical allusion; and his assimilation of an unusually wide range of musical material – from folksongs to note-rows, from triads to seemingly atonal chords – without any compromise to the compositional voice.

Dr Francis Jackson’s work at York Minster, coupled with his activities as a world famous recitalist, made it impossible for him to devote regular hours to composition. That he has composed such a large body of work in a variety of different genres is testimony to his talent as a composer and his devotion to the craft.

In this article originally appearing in the RCO Journal of 2017, Philip Moore analyses Jackson’s compositional techniques, his approach to word-setting, and gives some suggestions on the interpretation and registration of Jackson’s choral and liturgical works.

Sir George Thomas Smart (1776–1867) is not as well known to the general musical public as he should be, not least because he was the first British musician to wield a baton over his forces and the first to take sole charge of a musical performance. The famous and misleading quote in the title is one of the most widely known anecdotes from his life, but this humorous aside does not reflect Smart’s attitude to the organ and its music in 1851, nor his reforming zeal.

In this article from the RCO Journal of 2017, John Scott Whiteley examines Bach’s selection of traditional hymns for the Orgelbuchlein, and the tensions between Pietism, a Protestant renewal movement, and Lutheran Orthodoxy, in his sources.

The 2017 edition of the College’s annual research publication, The Journal of the Royal College of Organists, can be downloaded here as a complete edition.

The 2016 edition of the College’s annual research publication, The Journal of the Royal College of Organists, can be downloaded here as a complete edition.

With the formal winding up of the Percy Whitlock Trust in 2017 due to the lapsing of copyright, Robert Gower gives a summary of the aims and achievements of the Trust during its existence, and discusses Whitlock’s musical legacy.

For the Centenary Celebrations of the College one event in particular stands out, a concert organised by Peter Hurford at the Royal Albert Hall on 24 September 1966 entitled ‘Organ, In Sanity and Madness’.  At the viewing distance of a half-century, it is timely to note its context, its impact, and subsequent repercussions.