Organs, liturgy, and spaces at Lincoln Cathedral before 1702

Magnus Williamson recounts the archival and archeological detective work that has taken place at Lincoln Cathedral, in conjunction with the Byrd quatercentenary.  By bringing the building in line with post-Restoration practice in 1702, the Dean and Chapter also ended a spatial arrangement which had once generated the rich pre-Reformation tradtions of organs and voices in ‘alternatim’.  The characteristics of the building, and their musical implications, are probed in detail.

Thomas Tomkins’s musical antecedents

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.

Music for a Queen

The public were quick to show their appreciation of all the music that underpinned the services marking the passing of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. We look at the contributions made in particular by organists, choral directors and composers, including those associated with the RCO from its earliest days.

Performing Purcell’s Voluntary for Double Organ

The most substantial of Purcell’s organ works, the Voluntary for Double Organ has been described as ‘an exuberant product of the English Baroque’.  This paper by Desmond Hunter reviews aspects of the notation and considers several issues concerning the work’s performance, set against the background of a more general discussion of the genre.