Huge privilege to be made MBE, says renowned organist and conductor Anna Lapwood

A renowned organist, conductor and TikTok sensation who has challenged sexism in her industry said it is a “huge privilege” to be on the honours list for an MBE for services to music.

Anna Lapwood, 28, the director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, told the PA news agency: “I just couldn’t quite believe it and it’s still sinking in, I guess.”

Ms Lapwood was the first woman organ scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, in its 560-year history and is now an associate artist of the Royal Albert Hall and also a conductor at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College.

She has introduced the organ to a new audience on TikTok, where she has more than 690,000 followers and amassed more than 21 million likes.

On being made a MBE, she said: “It’s just completely mad. When the letter arrived, I think I sort of screamed and ran around in circles a little bit.

“It just feels like such a huge privilege in this quest to try and put the organ on the map a little bit more. It feels like another tick in that box. It’s really exciting.”

She continued: “With music, so much of what we do, as musicians, is not quantifiable.

“The instrument is never finished and so it feels like a massive moment, in a way, of saying, you know what, perhaps that is something and perhaps that something is quantifiable in the form of the honour.”

Ms Lapwood regularly plays at the Royal Albert Hall and has collaborated with artists including Alison Balsom, Raye, Bonobo and Benedict Cumberbatch.

She began playing the organ as a teenager because her father was a priest “so I had been around churches growing up”, she said.

“I didn’t fall in love with it straightaway. I found it very, very hard at first, but that made me even more determined to try to figure out how to play,” she said.

She established a girls’ choir at Pembroke College, which she said is “such a huge part of who I am as a musician”.

She said singing is a “great way” to encourage young musicians “because people don’t need to buy instruments or anything like that, it’s just using themselves, and the girls at Pembroke, they sing so beautifully and are so bright and determined and full of life and joy”.

“If I’m ever having a bad day, I take choir practice, and it’s like everything is beautiful with the world again. It’s quite a nice feeling.”

She recalled being encouraged to “play like a man” during an organ competition as a college student and the experience pushed her to advocate for girls and women in music.

She said: “This examiner basically said, ‘We loved it, it was very accurate, very exciting. We just thought you needed to play more like a man’. I remember at the time thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, what?’

“I think we’re all kind of hoping for the day when we just do not need to talk about what gender a musician is because it really shouldn’t make a difference, but the reality is that the number of organists in the top positions – the number of male versus female organists – is not even.

“Until we get to a point where those numbers are evening out, I think we do still have to, in inverted commas, bang the gender agenda drum a little bit and just make sure that the next generation are seeing visible role models.”

Ms Lapwood is an advocate for music education generally and believes “encouraging young people to pursue excellence, for the sake of excellence, is a good thing in itself”.

Playing music “has all these other advantages and it is wonderful for mental health and teamwork and concentration but we shouldn’t ignore the importance of encouraging young people to pursue excellence in its own right”, she added.