Frederick Stocken is a composer, organist and musicologist
His works include two symphonies, a violin concerto, a ballet, organ and choral pieces. His music has been broadcast on the BBC and Classic FM.
He is published by OUP and Banks Music, and has been commissioned by Southern Cathedrals Festival, The Worshipful Company of Musicians, Rikkyo University Tokyo, and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Orchestral works have been performed by the RPO at the Royal Albert Hall and by the orchestra of the State Theatre in Giessen, Germany. His organ works have been performed at King’s College, Cambridge. Choral works have been performed by the choirs of Chichester Cathedral and the Brompton Oratory. Conductors include Vernon Handley, John Lubbock and Charles Hazlewood.
The CD of Lament for Bosnia was number one in the classical charts of Tower Records, and he conducted the Strings of the Academy for a performance marking the opening of the permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. He also conducted a performance in Bosnia by the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra.
Frederick is Organist of St George’s Metropolitan Cathedral in Southwark. He was Organ Scholar of St Catharine’s College Cambridge where he studied with Peter Hurford and Peter le Huray. He has played for broadcast services on BBC radio and television, and has made recordings as accompanist on the Priory and Regent labels. Frederick first studied the organ with Kenneth Beard as a chorister at Southwell Minster. He won five prizes at ARCO as a student of Derrick Cantrell at Chetham’s School of Music, and a further three prizes at FRCO.
Frederick teaches for the Royal College of Organists, for which he is also an examiner, and he presented the RCO’s first live webinars. He examined for the ABRSM in many countries, and trained examiners for a decade. His educational publications include Scale Shapes (Chester Music), Graded Keyboard Musicianship (OUP) and The New Oxford Organ Method (OUP), the last two co-authored with Anne Marsden Thomas.
His composing mentors were Margaret Hubicki and Howard Ferguson, and his doctoral thesis at the University of Manchester complemented his compositional studies, published as Simon Sechter’s Fundamental Bass Theory and its influence on the music of Anton Bruckner. As a musicologist he has written articles for Music & Letters and The Musical Times and has given pre-concert talks on Bruckner’s symphonies for the RLPO and the LPO.