George Chittenden

I am a British concert organist based in the Arctic North of Norway, where I am Cathedral Organist and Director of Music at Bodø Cathedral. I read for an MA (Hons) in History with Music Studies at the University of Aberdeen from 2002 to 2006, stayed on to teach organ and piano there until 2010, and hold the Associateship of the Royal College of Organists (ARCO), the College's professional diploma in organ performance and musicianship.

From 2010 to 2011 I was Artist in Residence at Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, Connecticut. I then spent five years as Director of Music at St Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin, New Zealand, from 2011 to 2016, followed by five years as organist of St Mary's Church in Helsingborg, Sweden — the church where Buxtehude was organist in the 1650s — before moving to Bodø in 2021. I perform internationally: recitals have taken me to St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, St Bavo's Cathedral in Gent, Uppsala Cathedral, Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grâce in Paris, Blackburn Cathedral, Auckland Town Hall and the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. My recordings include discs of Bach and Vierne made in Sweden, and at Bodø I direct the cathedral's choirs and programme Nordlands Orgelsommer, an international organ festival which in 2026 brought seven visiting organists from across Europe to the Arctic.

I have been teaching since 2006 — organ and piano at the University of Aberdeen and privately in the city until 2010, on Royal School of Church Music courses during my years in New Zealand, and at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in 2018, alongside masterclasses and specialist coaching for advanced and postgraduate organ students internationally.

All my teaching is online, so lessons take place wherever your instrument is — a church loft, a chapel, a practice room, or a digital organ at home. We begin from whatever you have access to. I teach organists preparing for RCO and AGO diplomas and certificates, church musicians who play regularly for services, pianists taking up the organ, and students working towards auditions or postgraduate study. I have taught piano alongside organ since 2006, which is often useful when someone is making that change. Lessons are given in English or Swedish, and I also read Norwegian and Danish.

Lessons are practical, and paced to suit you. We would usually give some attention to technique in each session — articulation, registration and pedalling — before turning to repertoire. My own areas are English cathedral music, Buxtehude and his contemporaries, the French school from 1860 to 1960, Nordic organ music, and transcriptions and arrangements, though I am glad to work on whatever you would like to play. There is also a good deal of practical ground we can cover if it would be helpful: hymn playing and liturgical accompaniment, choral accompanying, registering an unfamiliar instrument, transposition, modulating between hymns, and putting a recital programme together.

Teaching the organ online does ask a little more of the equipment at both ends than most instruments do, since it helps if I can see the pedals as well as the manuals. Two devices generally work well: a laptop or tablet on the music desk showing the manuals, and a phone on a small stand, placed low and to one side, angled towards the pedalboard. Sound is worth a thought too — the processing used in most video calls is designed for speech and does an organ few favours, so the original-sound or music setting is usually the better option, and a wired network connection is helpful where the building has one. I arrange my own end so that you can see the console clearly, pedals included. If any of this is awkward, we can spend a little of a first session sorting it out.