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.

Richard Brasier explains how Beethoven’s early experiences with the organ as a church musician gradually helped to transform piano technique during the early-Romantic period, in a discussion of his new edition of Beethoven’s works for the organ and for Flötenuhr, published by Verlag Dohn in 2020.

The clear division of Bach’s keyboard works into those for organ and those for clavier is one that is more evident to modern editors than it probably was to performers in eighteenth-century Germany.  Francis Knights discusses a few works that appear to fall into neither camp, and the evidence they provide for the particular instrument they may have been played on.

Tom Bell uses W. T. Best’s editions of Bach to open a window into the world of a Victorian musician, and to explore nineteenth-century performance practice. 

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.