Andrew McCrea interviews the eminent Dutch organist and composer Piet Kee, to mark Kee’s 85th birthday.  Kee’s influence as a performer, improviser, composer and teacher has been far-reaching, and the RCO conferred Honorary Fellowship on him in 1988. A select bibliography can be found at the end of the article, which first appeared in the […]

The organists and choir-trainers who founded the College of Organists created a new kind of singing voice, which has had a tremendous influence right up to the present day.  Just before the Second World War, music critics from around Europe remarked that the outstanding contribution of England to the music of the world was the […]

The interest in church music in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain was considerable, with the musical press regularly carrying correspondence on a wide range of topics – the training of clergy and musicians, repertoire, organ music and the ordering of churches.   A glance at any modern British hymnal reveals our indebtedness to the authors, translators, editors, […]

Nicholas Thistlethwaite provides a fascinating window into the musical controversies of the early 1860s, around the time when the College of Organists was founded.  He notes  a climate in which correspondents and editors of musical publications had a freedom of expression which today appears remarkable.  Protected by anonymity, the personal animosities of the Victorian musical […]

By 1887 the College of Organists had already begun to make its mark – its membership increasing in relation to the great burst of church building that took place between 1850 and 1900.  Peter Horton compares the careers of four organists of this time – S S Wesley, Hopkins, Smart and Monk.  As he says […]

Given the sluggish rate of publication of original compositions for organ in the years around the foundation of the College of Organists, it was an enlightened move for the College to promote, as one of their first acts, a competition for an original organ piece.  Graham Barber looks at the state of organ composition in […]

In this paper, originally given at the conference to mark the RCO’s 150th Anniversary, and subsequently printed in the RCO Journal for 2014, David Wright discusses how the RCO played an important part in the move to ‘professionalize’ music in Victorian Britain, and give musicians and their activities a new status that was both respectable […]

In this article Rosemary Golding examines the professional status and remuneration of the organist in the run-up to the foundation of the College of Organists in 1864, by examining contemporary advertisements and correspondence in The Musical Times and similar publications.  It originally appeared in The RCO Journal in 2014. RCO Journal 2014_Golding  

In this article from the RCO Journal from 2014, Andrew McCrea describes the foundation of the College of Organists in 1864 (the Royal Charter came later) and looks at the characters and preoccupations of the founding fathers.  His sources include the earliest minute books of the College, which have survived in the archives, and have […]