The Fantazia of foure parts is one of the best-known and most-often performed of Orlando Gibbons’s keyboard works. Desmond Hunter looks at Gibbons’s structuring of his large-scale fantasias, and how the qualities of these works can be brought out in performance.

David Baker looks at how the organ’s importance grew with the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century, not primarily as a solo instrument, but as a means to make worship dignified and expressive.

Ethel Smyth’s organ works form a small part of her list of compositions, but still reflect many facets of her life. Richard Moore analyses the sources and structures in Smyth’s organ compositions in relation to her social and professional relationships, and examines the influence of Bach, Brahms and Reger on her writing.

2024 is an anniversary year for both Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, and Sir Walter Parratt, a close friend and colleague of Stanford. This article by Andrew McCrea mainly looks at Parratt, a famous organist and teacher, through the Stanford association, and argues that inspecting Stanford’s dedications to Parratt can enrich our understanding of these two national figures.

This occasional research paper by Desmond Hunter reconsiders approaches to the performance of Byrd’s keyboard music based on a re-examination of the evidence in the sources, informed by the experience of playing and studying this music over many years. He also draws on research by other scholars and performers of Byrd’s keyboard music.

The RCO Organ Forum in 2024 marked the centenary of Charles Villiers Stanford’s death with a day of discussion and performances at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Stanford spent much of his musical life.

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.

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.