The RCO management team is required to pull together on Conferment day and perform some interesting tasks, outside our usual skillsets. First thing in the morning wicker baskets arrive full of assorted gowns and hoods, and the robing department has to make sure that everyone gets the correct gorgeous garments for the ceremony. We stuff the programmes with appropriate fliers and donation envelopes, and become ushers and usherettes as soon as the audience starts to arrive. And all in amongst the Royal College of Organists holds its Annual General Meeting…

Two young RCO members are carving out careers for themselves as composers, alongside their organ playing. Both Matthew Kelley and Tammas Slater won in the junior category the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers competition in 2015, and for both of them this has been a life-changer, leading to a series of further commissions.

Joe McHardy was convinced he’d failed his FRCO earlier this year, so when he got emails telling him not only that he had passed, but been awarded the Durrant Prize, and then the John Birch Scholarship, he thought there must have been some mistake. He tells us what the Scholarship, and the RCO, have meant for him.

You can watch the College’s 2016 Conferment of Diplomas ceremony in full or as edited highlights.

Professor Peter Williams, Bach Scholar and a Vice President of the RCO, has passed away, appropriately around midnight just before Bach’s birthday, the 21st March. Official tributes will of course be paid elsewhere, but I would like to remember a study day which I attended as a very newbie organist, in which his sharp, questioning intelligence, combined with great authority, were powerfully in evidence.

RCO members, students and their families filled Southwark Cathedral on Saturday for the 2016 Conferment of Diplomas.

Famously prickly, irascible, caring and encouraging, Dr Bernard Rose was a one-off, and for over five decades a living legend in the UK’s choirmaster world.

The Conferment of Diplomas is the public centrepiece of the Royal College of Organists’ year. In 2015 it was held in Southwark Cathedral, London, and you can watch a video of the proceedings here.

The Conferment of Diplomas is the public centrepiece of the Royal College of Organists’ year. In 2013 it was held in Southwark Cathedral, London.