2025 was celebrated as Play the Organ Year – a national initiative created by the RCO and its partners to spark a year-long programme of engagement and outreach.
The aim was not only to encourage more people to learn the organ, but also to help many more discover the pleasure of hearing and enjoying organ music, both live and recorded.
We worked throughout the year on the belief that the best way to achieve these goals was to get as many people as possible close to the instrument: not only hearing it and seeing it, but actually playing it.
The organ is a magnificent instrument unlike any other – powerful, versatile, visceral and enormous fun to play. At the heart of Play the Organ Year was a commitment to open that experience to as many people as possible: encouraging them to take a step towards the organ, to lay hands on it wherever they could, and to feel for the first time the unique and thrilling sensation of playing this remarkable instrument.
Whether you were a complete musical beginner or perhaps just new to the organ, Play the Organ Year offered something for everyone, including:
The Play the Organ Year resources, information sheets, session plans, templates and other resources to help organists and venues plan and deliver their own Play the Organ Year activity are all still available.
Click here to visit our Organiser Resources page, where you can download all these resources individual or as a complete pack.
No one has done more in recent years to widen the appeal of the organ than Play the Organ Year Patron Anna Lapwood.
As well as being a hugely successful performer, recording artist, conductor, and broadcaster, Anna is a tireless advocate for music education and engagement. A natural communicator, she reaches a huge audience through her concerts, her many television and radio appearances, and via social media where she has more than a million followers.
Anna’s passion for the organ is matched by her mission to support girls and women in music, with her #playlikeagirl hashtag becoming a rallying cry for a whole new generation of young female musicians.
Anna was awarded the MBE in 2024 for services to music, and we are delighted to welcome her as our Patron for Play the Organ Year 2025.
East Midlands
Alexander Binns
Scotland
John Kitchen
East of England
Sarah MacDonald
South of England
Richard McVeigh
Wales
Stephen Moore
West Midlands
Daniel Moult
Northern Ireland
Matthew Owens
North of England
David Pipe
The Royal College of Organists' vision is for “a world in which organ and choral music are widely valued as being central to cultural and spiritual life”.
As organists we work to achieve this by promoting and advancing the highest standards of organ playing and choral directing, in order that our music making can inspire and engage those who encounter it.
But what do we do when not enough people do encounter our music?
The story of declining church attendances, drastic cuts in school music education, and ever-smaller audiences for live performances, is a familiar one. Wherever one looks, music – and particularly classical music – seems to be in trouble.
Of course this is by no means a new challenge for organists. More than 30 years ago National Learn the Organ Year, the brainchild of Anne Marsden Thomas MBE, set out to tackle this same problem. There are undoubtedly organists performing today whose first experience of the organ was at such an event.
In 2025, with the need and the challenge arguably greater than ever before, we set out once again to engage and inspire even more people by adding the power of modern technology to a new year-long programme of ‘real world’ events and activity.