[Left: William McKie, then organist at Westminster Abbey, with his former teacher, Arthur E.H. Nickson, circa 1953]
The contribution to the musical tradition of St Peter’s in the early twentieth century by Arthur E. H. Nickson has been described by Colin Holden in the context of the growth of a particular sort of parish identity in those years.1 Nickson’s own identification with the Anglo-Catholic cause, particularly as it was expressed at St Peter’s, was an essential element that informed his views on the nature of church music. This essay will seek to give a taste of Nickson’s views on church music through his 1916 essay, An Ideal in Church Music, which bore a foreword written by E. S. Hughes, vicar of St Peter’s 1900-1926.
Nickson was born in 1876, the third child of English parents. The family appears to have been a very devout Evangelical Anglican household; bibles formerly belonging to Nickson’s mother that survive in the Nickson Collection at the Grainger Museum show signs of having been well read, with underlining, cuttings from Anglican Church newspapers, devotional cards and extensive spiritual notes written in the flyleaves. It is unclear where Nickson went to school; the family was closely associated with St Michael’s church in North Carlton, where Nickson’s father was superintendent of the Sunday school for many years. Nickson’s early musical education appears to have been directed by a Mr Heathcote and after 1890 with Ernest Wood, who had arrived the previous year to become the first organist at the newly completed St Paul’s Cathedral. Nickson also appears to have studied the piano under Wood’s sister.2 In 1895 Nickson became the first organist to win the Clarke scholarship, founded to enable young Victorian musicians to study at the Royal College of Music. At the RCM Nickson studied organ under Sir Walter Parratt, and was also organist and choirmaster at Farnham Parish Church. After graduating from the RCM in 1899, and gaining the Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists in 1901 Nickson returned to Australia. His subsequent career included various organist appointments at churches in Melbourne, his longest association was at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill (1901-c1916, c1929-1948), then regarded as the leading Anglo-Catholic centre in the Diocese of Melbourne. From 1904 Nickson was on the staff at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium, where he lectured in counterpoint, music history and aesthetics, and was chief study organ teacher. From 1927-47 Nickson was music critic at the Age, which enabled him to reach a wider audience through concert reviews and other articles. This influence was recognised in the conferring of an honorary DMus by Melbourne University in 1959 and he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1963. He died in 1964, and is memorialised with a travelling scholarship that bears his name and memorial plaques in the baptistery at St Peter’s and in the foyer of the Conservatorium.
Nickson was identified at a very early stage of his career with the Anglo-Catholic cause in Melbourne, mostly through his connection with St Peter’s, and with E. S. Hughes. An expression of Nickson’s identification with Anglo-Catholicism can be seen in his concern for the ‘proper’ performance of public services, evidenced by a reproving missive over the conduct of a marriage service in a prominent city church.3 Another letter deplored the poor state of access to the sacraments and ‘definite’ teaching across the Melbourne diocese as a whole. Nickson commented that the theory was “truly Catholic”, but in practice he found that in most parishes he would be:
denied the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar but once a month; the Sacrament of Penance altogether; Matins, Litany, and Evensong (with one exception) every day of the week…my children would not be catechised…their preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation would be…inadequate.4
The pattern of services that Nickson did find adequate was that which had developed at St Peter’s, where a sung Eucharist was the main Sunday service; the pattern elsewhere tended to be Matins, with Eucharist once a month. Churches were frequently kept closed during the week, and Matins and Evensong tended not to be public services other than on Sunday. Nickson’s main complaint here was that he saw a fundamental confusion in the priorities of the Church, commenting that in the:
Neglect of any one portion of the Church's system so much failure is courted…if doctrine be eliminated from the teaching men can not be expected to know the Truth; if ritual is neglected ideas of worship will be meagre and weak; if "bright" services be the continual aim, then penitence, from which true joy springs, must be disproportionately obscured.5
Under these circumstances, Nickson asked, who could reproach him for seeking a parish where these needs could be met? There is a strong element of the line of loyalty to the Book of Common Prayer that had been a major issue in the churchmanship debates of the previous century, although in this context Nickson’s central concern was that the Church should give people “a reasonable chance of faithfully fulfilling the end of their being by becoming intelligent worshippers of Him Who created us for this express purpose”.6
Nickson’s views on church music were the logical outcome of his views on the Church. Nickson published numerous articles related to church music, ranging from reviews of hymn books and other material to essays on congregational participation in the music of the liturgy and commentary pieces on how the use of music could express the structure of the liturgy and the Church seasons.7 Nickson viewed the Church as God’s instrument in the world: the music of the Church had to express this. In An Ideal in Church Music, Nickson identified several qualities possessed by true church music, which was:
The unfolding of the Church’s musical will interfused with its mind and swayed by its innate feeling of adoration in worship. The Church shuns idolatry…it follows that its music must not minister to its own delight, but must ring again with an echo that answers to the nature and quality of the sphere from which it springs.8
Liturgical music had to express the nature of the Church itself. To show how this might be made clear, Nickson identified qualities in the music that had to be present in order that it might be expressing something of the nature of the Church. This was heavily influenced by the statement in the Nicene Creed that the Church was “one, [holy,] Catholick and Apostolick”.9 Church music had one style: vocal music. Church music was holy because it reflected human participation in the divine. It was catholic because it had the capacity to “deepen penitence and to perfect praise” in people so disposed. Church music was apostolic because music was ultimately of divine providence, and had been “ascribed to Divinity by writers sacred and profane” throughout history.10
Nickson identified several composers whose music he identified as representing the greatest advances in music at every stage of history: Ambrose, Pope Gregory, Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Elgar, Parry; “these names are among the greatest that can be mentioned.”11 These composers stood out for Nickson because “while the artist can be fully satisfied with the glory of their creations, the Churchman also willingly accepts them, for, applying a still more searching test, he finds in addition that the Church’s ideal, the eternal Marks are there.” Their music possessed an authority that Nickson regarded as “Apostolic if there is any meaning in the word; therefore, their Authority, when it has not been driven from the upper consciousness of the Church’s mind, has been recognised ‘Everywhere, Always, and by All.’”12 On the other hand, as Nickson saw it, ultimately it had to be admitted that there “are both unmusical Churchmen, and unecclesiastical musicians working as precentors, organists, choirmasters”; if they would listen to each other’s concerns and work together, a better way that furthered the Church’s mission might be found.13
Nickson’s work as a church musician demonstrated these ideals at work, and the response that his ideals could draw. At St Peter’s he ran a choir of men and boys, and on his first Sunday as organist in 1903 he introduced plainsong, resulting in a sudden strike by members of the choir.14 Nickson viewed congregational participation as an important part of the Anglican liturgy, and his view of this was summed up in a series of suggestions published as an appendix to An Ideal in Church Music, which strongly suggests that he regarded this participation as part of the preparation for receiving communion. He stated that each person should:
Enter the Church with the intention of fulfilling as far as you are concerned the responsive nature of the Prayer Book Services.
Say in an audible voice what is to be said. Sing the parts intended to be sung by all. Congregational singing is more a matter of will than of musical ability. Only a few have no ear for music. If you know yourself to be one of these, then, and then only, be content with the silent melody of the heart.15
Music tended to be the focus of liturgical innovations during Hughes’s incumbency at St Peter’s, and he supported music as enrichment to the liturgy.16 However, Hughes himself had no musical gifts, and wrote in the foreword that he considered himself “amongst the few doomed to ‘be content with the silent melody of the heart’”.17
The publication of An Ideal in Church Music in 1916 coincided with Nickson’s resignation from St Peter’s to take up the post of organist at St John’s Toorak, a parish with a contrasting style of churchmanship. As has been observed above, Nickson’s introduction of plainchant in 1903 met with resistance. At the end of 1917 the vestry of St John’s remonstrated with the vicar, Canon Drought, requesting that the recently introduced ‘choral communion’ service should be discontinued. It is not clear whether Nickson was the instigator of the choral communion services, however, Drought informed the vestry that “the choral communion had been in vogue in St John's Church some time back” and that the move in 1917 was not an innovation.18 The main Sunday service at St John’s at this time was Matins, with the Eucharist celebrated only on the third Sunday of the month, a pattern consistent with an Evangelical style of worship. In a move that recalled Bishop Perry’s edicts on music in the liturgy, fearing that the introduction of surpliced choirs and sung services would lead to the full program of ‘ritualist’ doctrine, one parishioner had threatened legal action against the parish vestry to stop the service from being offered.19 One wonders how close Nickson stood to the centre of the controversy at St John’s in 1917.
[English and Catholic, but not Roman: sanctuary party robed according to the Sarum use at St Peter's, Eastern Hill, c1900. E.S. Hughes is second from the right. Reproduced from Colin Holden, The Holiness of Beauty: Ecclesiastical Heritage (Melbourne: St Peter's Anglican Church, 1996), 12]
PVgm = Grainger Museum, the University of Melbourne.
1 Colin Holden, From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass: A History of St Peter's, Eastern Hill (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996) pp 101-3.
2 A E H Nickson, "Overwhelmed with Kindness + Good Feeling...." Speech on occasion of AEHN's 80th birthday, given at a formal reception in his honour., Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 2.
3 A E H Nickson, Holy Matrimony, unidentified newspaper clipping at p 71 of scrapbook, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 4, Melbourne.
4 A E H Nickson, “Are We Congregationalists?”, unidentified newspaper clipping at p 69 of scrapbook: written after 1917?, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 4.
7 A E H Nickson, "Plainsong Pt. 1," Church Commonwealth (1903); Nickson, "Plainsong Pt. 2," Church Commonwealth (1903); Nickson, "Congregational Singing," Church Commonwealth ? (1903); Nickson, "Intention in the Work of the Organist," The Mitre (1904); Nickson, “Music as an Expression of Liturgical Form”, unidentified newspaper clipping at pp 90-1 of scrapbook, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 4, Melbourne; Nickson, “Congregational Worship”, unidentified newspaper clipping at pp 92-3 of scrapbook, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 4, Melbourne; Nickson, “The Attitude of the Clergy Towards Musical Reform”, unidentified newspaper clipping at pp 88-9 of scrapbook, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 4, Melbourne.
9 Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1662) p 241.
10 Nickson, An Ideal in Church Music pp 3-4.
11 Nickson, An Ideal in Church Music p 4.
12 Nickson, An Ideal in Church Music p 4.
13 Nickson, An Ideal in Church Music p 5.
17 Nickson, An Ideal in Church Music.
18 Vestry Minutes, 1/11/1917, St John's Toorak, Melbourne.
19 Holden, From Tories at Prayer pp 40-1, 237-8, Albert McPherson, "Architecture, Music Art and Liturgy in the Diocese of Melbourne," Melbourne Anglicans: The Diocese of Melbourne 1847-1997, ed. Brian Porter (Melbourne: Mitre Books, 1997) pp 62-4, Vestry Minutes, 1/11/1917.
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