Happy New Year! I’ll start with the next two meetings, both affected by the lockdown:

This Monday, January 11th, we can’t meet at Southwark cathedral, but we hope to return later in the year.

Saturday, February 20th, instead of the composite recital at Penge, we’re inviting our members to video-record a piece of music for time together on Zoom on the same day at 7.30p.m. We’d love to have plenty of offerings! Richard Pilliner (Vice-Chair) and Sam Gover (Committee member responsible for the website) will be delighted to receive a piece of music from you. Please e-mail it to Richard and/or Sam at [email protected]. If you need assistance, do contact Sam. He suggests: “for sending videos, it’s worth using a file transfer service as typical iphone type videos require about 130MB per minute, and most email systems can’t cope much over 10MB – wetransfer.com is free to use, you don’t need to register, just upload your file and enter your and the recipient’s email addresses. If anyone needs technical advice i’m happy to help”.

If you would rather provide an audio performance, that will be fine. Some of you will not be able to get into your church and some will have an organ at home. If you can play a suitable organ piece on a piano and send it, we’ll consider using it!

Please announce your piece before you play, or e-mail what you would like Richard to read out or print for the audience. Ideally we need a sentence to include your name, area where you live and a few words about you (e.g. main job is as a plumber / at school / Director of Music at St. Mary’s), then a brief word about your piece. Please keep the total to about thirty seconds.

Richard and Sam may need to edit what they are sent, e.g, the same piece twice, length of performance and quality of the recording. SSLSO will consider putting some pieces on to the website at a later stage and we’ll ask for the approval of the player.

This event is aimed at people of all levels of musical ability. We especially want to include members who don’t usually have a chance to play in front of others. Your inclusion is valuable and we encourage everyone to think about taking part.

All very exciting – get going!

Other news:

1. We’ll let you know about the March meeting (Monday 15th.), which is the AGM and a short recital.

2. Richard Pilliner was a student of Arthur Wills RIP – see his obituary of his teacher here.

3. At the end of 2020, we heard of the death from cancer of Catherine Ennis. This is the link to RCO’s obituary. 2020 gave us the deaths of Jane Parker-Smith and Jennifer Bate as well, so we lost a trio of hugely talented women organists.

4. David Flood retired from Canterbury Cathedral at the end of 2020. He had been Director of Music there since 1988.

5. Finally, links to performances by members of our Society: Marilyn Harper played on an organ at the Horniman Museum; here is the link.

6. William McVicker says: “As we can’t go out much in Tier 4 I thought I’d send you a link to something I’ve worked on during the second major lockdown in November — a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s nine-movement symphonic cycle La Nativité du Seigneur (1935). Included are words and images which give added depth to the music. Each movement has a biblical quotation as a sub title and the Rev James Harratt has included some thoughts in respect of each of these passages. I am extremely grateful to James, the vicar at Bromley Parish Church, and to the Rev Sophie Sutherland and Reader Peter Cheshire for assisting in the compilation of what I hope will provide an appropriate meditative distraction from the pandemic as well as food for thought.  The YouTube link is here.

Richard and Sam look forward to receiving your musical offerings!

The next newsletter will be no February 6th. Do let me know if you have any news or musical links which you would like to be included.

All good wishes, John