The increasing severity of the Covid-19 lockdown means that organists are not just faced with a sudden loss of work, but also restricted or no access to their instrument.  To fill this enforced downtime, the RCO is making their online virtual campus iRCO available to all organists, so that learning, at least, can continue. Here on StopPress we are collating this material into themed packages to help improve different aspects of your playing.

A playlist of much of the music in the new syllabus for the FRCO examination.

The repertoire for the new ARCO examination syllabus, in a Spotify playlist.

Listen to the new syllabus, from July 2020, of playing repertoire for the CRCO examination.

Andrew Cantrill-Fenwick and Ronny Krippner present a video on improvising a hymn partita – using the blueprint of a hymn tune to create a set of variations based on the creative manipulation of harmony, rhythm and registration.

As Covid-19 shuts down concert halls, schools and churches, RCO colleagues suggest ways in which the spare time created in musicians’ lives can be used constructively, with suggestions for practice timetables, repertoire, and building new skills for the future.

Watch the College’s 2020 Conferment of Diplomas ceremony here, in full, or as edited highlights, and download the Programme, and the full texts of the speeches and citations.

Listen to the Ede & Ravenscroft Recital which closed the College’s 2020 Conferment of Diplomas ceremony, performed by Anne Page, which included works by Bach, Daniel Roth, Judith Weir and Olivier Messiaen.

Over sixty years ago, the Musicians’ Company, one of the historic livery companies of the City of London, inaugurated a scholarship in memory of the great Victorian concert organist, W T Best. This year the award has been renamed The Musicians’ Company Award for Organists, and candidates between the ages of 18 and 26 are invited to apply: the deadline for this is the end of February 2020.