Biographical Info

Dr Robin Harrison PhD FRSA BMus(Hons)/GradRNCM FNCM ARCO LTCL DipLCM PGCE(QTS) FGMS MISM NPQLTD

Robin Harrison is a pianist, organist and educator specialising in historically informed improvisation, and a part-time specialist teacher in classical piano improvisation at Chetham’s School of Music. He is founder and CEO of The Maestro Online, the world’s only Ofqual-regulated, historically informed Piano Improvisation Exam Board, whose Creativity Grades (Debut to Grade 8) carry UCAS points and sit alongside a masterclass platform featuring an international faculty of leading pianists, organists and jazz, pop and commercial musicians. He is also Director of Music at Aysgarth School (part of the Rugby School Group).

In 2027 Robin is a finalist in two individual categories of the Music & Drama Education Awards: “Instrumental or Vocal Teacher of the Year” and the “Music Inspiration Award”, while The Maestro Online is also a finalist for “Outstanding Music Education Resource”.

A former Lecturer in Academic Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he taught undergraduates and is himself an alumnus, Robin holds a PhD from the University of Wales, with a thesis on the late style of Frank Bridge. He is an Academy teacher at the Royal College of Organists, teaching annually at the RCO International Summer School, and a former RCO diploma examiner.

Robin’s path to improvisation ran through the ear rather than the page. A week with the gospel ensemble Black Voices at Dartington International Summer School led him to live and study with the Mandinka in The Gambia, learning their singing and drumming from a griot, and with communities in Ladysmith, South Africa, home of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Four years teaching in Cairo brought him under the wing of a Moscow-trained Russian jazz pianist who banned notation from the lesson room entirely — an apprenticeship in rock, pop and jazz that later took his jazz reworkings of popular songs to no. 1 in the UK and no. 33 worldwide. He has since taught across four continents and nine countries, and in 2025 gave a tour of masterclasses in Uganda (piano, organ, choral, conducting and singing), where he also conducted on national television.

Robin is co-author of the organ tutor Fingers & Feet: A Journey to the Organ Bench (Diocese of Leeds / Royal College of Organists) and contributed a chapter on the Kodály method to The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy (Routledge, 2021), commissioned following his presentation at the first International Aural Training Symposium at the Royal Academy of Music. He has spoken at the EPTA UK Annual Conference and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

On the summer course Robin’s teaching draws on the living tradition of keyboard improvisation — from the partimenti and galant schemata through which Mozart and his contemporaries learned, which underpin Baroque and Classical piano improvisation, through to jazz, gospel and contemporary styles — with a simple conviction at its heart: that improvisation is not an add-on to piano playing but an instinct every pianist already possesses, waiting to be trained.