Cambridge organist Anna Lapwood appointed MBE

A renowned organist and conductor who has challenged sexism in her industry says it is a “huge privilege” to be appointed MBE for services to music.

Anna Lapwood, 28, the director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, said her inclusion on the New Year Honours list was “still sinking in”.

Through TikTok she has introduced the organ to a new audience gaining more than 690,000 followers.

“It just feels like such a huge privilege,” she said.

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 in London and also a conductor at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College.

On being appointed MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire), 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.”

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 added.

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

Ms Lapwood 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.

“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,” she said.

“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.”