The College promotes an awareness of today’s music through the examination syllabuses, and some of Cecilia McDowall’s organ works have been set for study at ARCO in 2024-5.  The composer reveals her influences, inspirations and motivations in a fascinating interview with RCO Chief Examiner Stephen Farr, who gave the first performance of her First Flight in 2021.

Find inspiration for Woman Composer Sunday, on 10 March, with these resources from the RCO and partner organisations.

Engaging programming features in this year’s two BBC Proms organ concerts, with an international mix of performers and composers.

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.

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.