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.

Geoffrey Webber’s extensive commentary on the current editions of Buxtehude’s organ music was published to mark the Buxtehude Tercentenary year in 2007.  The aim of this resource is to allow players to move beyond having to rely on any one edition, and to make their own informed decisions about the textual problems.

The College’s library is as old as the College. From modest beginnings it has grown over the years into a library of great distinction, whose comprehensive specialist holdings of organ and choral music and books are known across the world.

The Journal of the Royal College of Organists is the College’s annual research publication, and the 2013 edition can be downloaded below.

The interest in church music in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain was considerable, with the musical press regularly carrying correspondence on a wide range of topics – the training of clergy and musicians, repertoire, organ music and the ordering of churches.   A glance at any modern British hymnal reveals our indebtedness to the authors, translators, editors, […]

Nicholas Thistlethwaite provides a fascinating window into the musical controversies of the early 1860s, around the time when the College of Organists was founded.  He notes  a climate in which correspondents and editors of musical publications had a freedom of expression which today appears remarkable.  Protected by anonymity, the personal animosities of the Victorian musical […]

By 1887 the College of Organists had already begun to make its mark – its membership increasing in relation to the great burst of church building that took place between 1850 and 1900.  Peter Horton compares the careers of four organists of this time – S S Wesley, Hopkins, Smart and Monk.  As he says […]

Given the sluggish rate of publication of original compositions for organ in the years around the foundation of the College of Organists, it was an enlightened move for the College to promote, as one of their first acts, a competition for an original organ piece.  Graham Barber looks at the state of organ composition in […]

In this paper, originally given at the conference to mark the RCO’s 150th Anniversary, and subsequently printed in the RCO Journal for 2014, David Wright discusses how the RCO played an important part in the move to ‘professionalize’ music in Victorian Britain, and give musicians and their activities a new status that was both respectable […]