The St Albans International Organ Festival is celebrating 60 years this summer since its founding in 1963 by Peter Hurford, who set out distinct aims for the Festival as its first Artistic Director.

The College’s bi-annual magazine for members contains features, details of forthcoming events and courses, and general news and views from the RCO.

The Coronation Service at Westminster Abbey on 6 May combined music from 350 years of church and royal tradition with many new commissions, all personally selected by The King.

Organists around the world celebrated International Organ Day 2023 with events, classes and demonstrations, posting films and pictures on social media throughout the day. We report on all the activities, culminating in the broadcast of The Organ Show-Live! on our YouTube channel.

In this second film in a series of short films on improvisation, Stéphane Mottoul, Organist at the Hofkirche, Lucerne, continues work on improvising a partita in Baroque style based on a hymn tune.

Watch the College’s 2023 Conferment of Diplomas Ceremony here, in full, or as edited highlights, and download the programme, along with the full texts of the speeches and citations.

In ‘Graphics, extended techniques, timbral diversity: collaborative approaches to contemporary organ music’, Daniel Matheison and Thomas Metcalf explore the composer-performer relationship, examining the relationships between a composer’s intention and a performer’s agency.

Tom Winpenny has recorded much of Francis Pott’s music, and this richly illustrated article on the organ works of Francis Pott is filled with an interpreter’s insights. Pott’s compositions are ‘revelatory creations of intellectual rigour and profound humanity,’ says Winpenny, and in his commentary and music examples we become absorbed in Pott’s preoccupations and motivations.

In ‘Michael Tippett’s shorter choral music: some personal reflections’, Nicholas Cleobury has distilled his work on, and with, Tippett over many years into an engaging commentary on some wonderful but often forgotten music.