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.

Marking the 450th anniversary of Thomas Tomkins’s birth, John Caldwell investigates this ‘honest quiet peaceable man’ as one contemporaneous document characterised him. The focus of Caldwell’s study is the keyboard music, and not least how Tomkins reacted to the idioms and techniques he discovered in an important English sixteenth-century manuscript which came into his possession.

Terence Charlston looks at recent editions from the newly founded publisher Lyrebird Music.  In this review article he not only reacts to the editorial mission and accomplishment but also stimulates our engagement as keyboard players with the interpretative challenges of the virginalist repertoire.

A gallery of pictures from the College’s annual Conferment Ceremony at Southwark Cathedral on Saturday 4 March, at which RCO President David Hill presented successful examination candidates with their awards and diplomas, and presented four RCO Medals.