For many decades interpreters of Vierne’s organ music have had little choice other than to play from scores which have been quite difficult to read; differentiating between sharps and naturals has often been a problem, for example. Publishers have frequently resorted to photocopying old printed editions for a new print run, with an inevitable loss […]

Dame Gillian Weir, in conversation with Andrew McCrea, reflects on Messiaen and the performance of his organ music. This discussion originally appeared as an article in the RCO Journal of 2008. RCO Journal 2008_Weir    

Where do we as ‘classical’ musicians stand, be we performers, teachers, examiners, promoters, listeners, or any combination of the above? Do we accept the status quo and acknowledge that we are just another niche interest in a crowded market place? Do we stand firm and hope that the integrity of our art will carry us […]

Paul Spicer discusses the music he has spent a lifetime espousing – the choral music by the composers who reinvented the musical wheel in this country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a genre which, in the right hands, could stand up and be counted, holding its own in any company, given a […]

This is an edited transcription of a lecture given at St George’s Hanover Square, London in April 2003 as part of that year’s London Handel Festival. Organised in collaboration with the Royal College of Organists and the Handel House Museum, the event to which this lecture was an introduction was entitled ‘Emerging from the Organ […]

In depending for their editing work on printed or MS copies preferably contemporary with the composer concerned, music editors over the last couple of centuries have gone through several phases in their approach to the job, phases varying from massive intervention to virtually none . Both can result in some difficulty for the player, not […]

Of the most influential musical figures of Victorian Britain, John Stainer must be considered a seminal personality who shaped the course of the nation’s history and progress. Though nowadays neglected as a composer, his influence as a church musician in the formation of the ‘reformed’ cathedral choir was immense and far-reaching. His work in education […]

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