Frederic Bayco

Frederic Bayco, sometimes spelt Fredric Bayco (1913 – 1970) was an English organist and composer of light music, best known for his Tudor pastiche Elizabethan Masque. Born in London (as Frederick James Baycock) he attended Brighton School of Music, took lessions from organist R H Timberley and composer Eric Thiman, and attained his ARCO. He was later made a fellow of the Royal College of Organists (FRCO). Before the war Bayco was a cinema organist (at the Gaumont, Union Street in Plymouth and on the Gaumont theatre circuit) and began to perform frequent theatre organ recitals, often broadcast by the BBC, at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, London and elsewhere. After war service in the Royal Air Force he became organist and director of music at Holy Trinity Church, Paddington, and also taught organ and musical appreciation at St Gabriel’s College, London from 1948. He was Chairman of the Light Music Society in the 1960s. Elizabethan Masque, a piece looking back on the ceremony and etiquette of the first Elizabethan era in the early years of the second, was composed in 1957. A Scherzo for organ was published by Edwin Ashdown in 1951. Like many composers of the light mus