There is always so much to pack into an organ lesson, and introducing a new piece to a student is often rushed, with the student then using unsuccessful strategies to learn it on their own.  This download from the RCO Academy suggests ways in which you can encourage a student to learn a piece accurately […]

Choosing the next piece for the student to learn is arguably the teacher’s most challenging and important task.  This download from the RCO Academy looks at how to choose good teaching pieces and suggests suitable tutor-books and anthologies.  It also includes a chart to assess the standard of your student and typical appropriate pieces. Repertoire […]

This download from the RCO Academy covers aspects of teaching technique to students, including posture, pedalling, and playing legato.  It addresses bad habits, particularly those that have been acquired initially on the piano, and suggests remedies, and includes a list of books for developing organ technique. Technique how to teach it This article originally appeared […]

This download from the RCO Academy, gives guidance to those teaching the organ – both those preparing for the Licentiateship in Teaching (LRTCO), and others who want to achieve a better result from their teaching.

French physiotherapist Coralie Cousin, who specialises in work with musicians, shares some of her observations on posture and gesture at the organ.

The nineteenth century in Britain was a time of public lectures and learned societies. The College of Organists was well ahead of its time, and offered improving lectures to an increasingly organised constituency of musicians from its foundation. Andrew McCrea provides an introduction and checklist of the lectures given from the early years of the […]

The Church Music Society (CMS) was founded in 1906 ‘to facilitate the selection and performance of the music which is most suitable for different occasions of Divine worship, and for different kinds of choir’. Richard Lyne reviews the history of the Society’s publications from the early twenty-first century, and notes how the publishing policy and […]

This article is a continuation of the Peter Horton’s article on Hopkins in RCO Journal 2009, on the composer, organist and organ historian Edward John Hopkins (1818–1901), who was a third-generation musician.  His close relations included three cathedral organists—his brother John (Rochester Cathedral) and cousins Edward (Armagh) and John Larkin (Rochester Cathedral and Trinity College, […]

Rather early in his life Robert Schumann developed the tendency to focus his compositional work on a specific genre for a certain period of time. Sometimes, for instance, he would compose almost nothing else but Lieder for a whole year. In 1845 it was the turn of the organ, an instrument that he might have […]