Peter Williams makes an interdisciplinary study of how we have the organ – in particular how we have it in church, in this article from the RCO Journal of 2011.  In a review of five publications relating to early Christianity and music, he discusses the interaction between Mediterranean technology, church authority, church practice, and function […]

Jehan Alain took a fluid view of his music, and very few of his organ works reached the stage of a definitive version in his lifetime.  This confusion has been compounded by discrepancies in published editions of Alain’s work throughout the twentieth century.  Stephen Farr discusses the available sources for selected organ works of Alain, […]

Charles Holt (d. 1978) was an organ enthusiast who made a point of listing several hundreds of performance timings of Vierne’s music – in particular his 24 Pieces en Style Libre.  Hugh Benham analyses Holt’s listings in this article from the RCO Journal of 2011, which reveal interesting differences between individual performers and Vierne’s own […]

Edward Higginbottom discusses aspects of performance that can bring to life the repertory of French organists composed between c1650 and c1750 – the ‘French Classical School’ – in the light of the aesthetic theory of the time.  In particular he discusses how the job of the organist of the time was to express the omitted […]

In this paper from the RCO Journal of 2011, Desmond Hunter reviews possible meanings of the grace signs in the sources of English keyboard music from around 1530 to the middle of the seventeenth century.   His argument concludes that the embellishment of this music requires an imaginative approach, rather than reliance on a particular formula. […]

For musicians and composers who could afford to travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Leipzig became a focus of pilgrimage.  As a leading centre for enlightened music publishing, with its association with Bach and Mendelssohn, not to mention having one of the finest opera houses in Germany, it attracted composers in search of […]

William Whitehead examines the question of Mendelssohn’s articulation markings in his organ music, and discusses what these markings might imply for performance.  This article originally appeared in the RCO Journal of 2012. RCO Journal 2012_Whitehead  

Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612) was arguably the most distinguished member of a Nuremberg family, and  among the first of a succession of German musicians to further their studies and stylistic development in Italy. Christopher Kent describes his life and times, with analysis of his organ works, and discussion of registration based on the possible stop […]

Stephen Farr discusses Helga Schauerte-Maubouet’s edition of Jehan Alain’s organ works for Barenreiter, and asks to what extent it represents an advance on previous published versions of the scores, and whether it resolves the fundamental problems of the source material for Alain’s music.   RCO Journal 2012_Farr