Below the jump you'll find another paper I wrote during my masters studies. It started life as a seminar paper, then it was accepted at an international conference (which gave me my first trip to the UK -- in winter, of all times!), and eventually formed the basis of a couple of sections of my dissertation. After that, I was invited to submit it for publication in Organ Australia.
This is the final version of the paper, as it was published in OA.
Many musicians who did their training in Melbourne between the 1930s and the 1950s recall Nickson as a hugely influential figure. His students included a few well-known composers, many performers and a very large cohort of teachers. A good number of Nickson students took the Clarke (Southern Provinces) Scholarship at the Royal College of Music as organists, some of whom subsequently carved out important careers in Europe and the Americas. Student reminiscences of Nickson range from the profoundly appreciative to lukewarm.
One of my firmest memories of piano exams was meeting with an examiner who had been a student of Nickson's in the '30s, found his idealism incomprehensible and thought it a waste of time taking an interest in him. My meeting with this examiner was in the early-1990s, following my earliest awareness of Nickson's work as a church musician: I was an incorrigible 14 year old. That examiner later became my most influential piano teacher, and revealed a whole other type of idealism through her teaching. Undoubtedly, I perplexed that teacher greatly, but the influence has stuck. I think this is why I still spend half my practice time trying to make beautiful lines. As a random thought, it sort of begs the question of whether it is better to know what a beautiful line is, and fall short, or to not know, and blunder through without insight. That's a thought for another time.
I think the biographical paragraph reveals some of the scope of Nickson's activities, although to the full text of the dissertation reveals all at much greater length and profound depth (you'll find a link to the digital copy through my CV page). Nickson is an interesting character, if only because his ideas remain challenging to our prevailing attitudes to aesthetics, whether we understand them in general terms or through a specifically religious or theological framework. That's not to say that there's any lack of problems in the way he worked out his ideas in particular cases -- and you'll see one of these below -- and in many ways this is exactly what gives his ideas a continuing relevance even more than fifty years since his active teaching career came to an end. The problems are certainly what made my research worthwhile.
One of my firmest memories of piano exams was meeting with an examiner who had been a student of Nickson's in the '30s, found his idealism incomprehensible and thought it a waste of time taking an interest in him. My meeting with this examiner was in the early-1990s, following my earliest awareness of Nickson's work as a church musician: I was an incorrigible 14 year old. That examiner later became my most influential piano teacher, and revealed a whole other type of idealism through her teaching. Undoubtedly, I perplexed that teacher greatly, but the influence has stuck. I think this is why I still spend half my practice time trying to make beautiful lines. As a random thought, it sort of begs the question of whether it is better to know what a beautiful line is, and fall short, or to not know, and blunder through without insight. That's a thought for another time.
I think the biographical paragraph reveals some of the scope of Nickson's activities, although to the full text of the dissertation reveals all at much greater length and profound depth (you'll find a link to the digital copy through my CV page). Nickson is an interesting character, if only because his ideas remain challenging to our prevailing attitudes to aesthetics, whether we understand them in general terms or through a specifically religious or theological framework. That's not to say that there's any lack of problems in the way he worked out his ideas in particular cases -- and you'll see one of these below -- and in many ways this is exactly what gives his ideas a continuing relevance even more than fifty years since his active teaching career came to an end. The problems are certainly what made my research worthwhile.
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Arthur E H Nickson was a significant organist, music critic and teacher in Melbourne through the first half of the 20th century. His influence was widespread through his sixty-year tenure at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium, where every student passed through his lectures at some stage in their course, in which he imparted a view of fine art as a sacramental symbol for the presence of God in the world.[1] Only one of Nickson’s essays will be examined here, Christ in Art. This essay stands out among the several essays Nickson published because it exemplifies the influences operating in Nickson’s thought, notably Anglo-Catholicism and Platonism, and also because he provided it as further reading in two later works written for students. This paper will examine Christ in Art in order to show some of the ways in which Platonism and Anglo-Catholicism were combined, and how they affected Nickson’s thinking about fine art, leading to an exploration of how, and under what conditions, music is the highest of the fine arts in his aesthetics.
Nickson was born in Melbourne 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 survive in the Nickson Collection at the Grainger Museum and 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 Parrat, and was also organist and choirmaster at the Parish Church of Farnham, in Surrey. 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, where 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 at St Peter’s and in the foyer of the Conservatorium.
Platonism and Anglo-Catholicism are two fundamental influences in Nickson’s thought, and have an interesting relationship. By embracing Anglo-Catholicism when he was in England, Nickson was making a break with the Evangelical spirituality of his youth at a time that was marked by friction between the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic parties in the Church of England.[3] This friction was manifested in differing views of the Sacraments and Tradition and the context and manner in which these were expressed. A telling example of this comes in differing responses to the Evolution theory; Evangelicals could often be seen retreating into what we would now call Biblical fundamentalism, while the Anglo-Catholics engaged with the concept, ultimately attempting to reconcile it with their theology.[4] The emphasis on tradition over fixed ideas of Biblical principle meant that Anglo-Catholicism was open to other influences, and its antiquarian tendency meant that the Platonist streak in the Church Fathers found a place in Nickson’s Anglo-Catholic theology. The connection of Platonism with Anglo-Catholicism is found in his lifelong interest in mysticism, which was influenced by William Inge’s Bampton Lectures for 1899, given under the title Christian Mysticism, a book Nickson is known to have possessed and valued highly.[5] Inge posits that mysticism represents a longstanding Platonic strand in Christianity, and stressed the role of the 3rd century philosopher Plotinus as an important source in the transmission of Platonism into Christianity in the form of Neoplatonism.[6] Nickson was certainly acquainted with Plato’s Republic; he quoted the Cave Myth in the notes to an aesthetics lecture regularly given at Melbourne University,[7] and Plotinus’s Enneads, the latter becoming readily available in English from 1917.[8] The following excerpt from the Enneads became a standard part of Nickson’s teaching materials, typed out and reproduced for distribution at lectures, and highlights some of his emphases;
The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty…This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design in things of sense; he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the Authentic-Existent which is the Source of all these correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art; he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty, but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses in himself.[9]
Nickson published several essays over his career, in addition to his writings as the music critic at the Age. Written and published around 1925, Christ in Art stands out among Nickson’s publications because of the manner in which he expounds his ideas; moreover, it is given as further reading in two later essays published for student readers, which indicates that Nickson viewed this as an important work. The essential argument in Christ in Art is that fine art, understood as architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry and music, functions sacramentally as understood in Anglo-Catholic theology – a symbol representing God’s active presence, conveying Grace to humankind, recalling them to the “fully spiritual kingdom” that preceded the descent into the world of sense.[10] The essay is fundamentally concerned with the role of the artist, and the context of fine art produced by human artists within the unfolding of God’s Creation. An account of Creation is advanced that draws heavily on Neoplatonic influences, and diverges from the traditional Christian account of Creation, based on Genesis, to explain the origin of the world. Nickson states that “‘Creation’ as a term may suggest a sense of remoteness separating the Creation from the Creator. The idea of Emanation is therefore more suggestive, and, we must think, closer to fact.”[11] Emanation is a concept that proposes that the world proceeds directly from the Godhead, like sparks from a fire, and as an account of the Creation belongs more properly to the philosophy of Plotinus than Plato. This has interesting implications in Nickson’s understanding of the nature of Christ; the Incarnation represents Jesus as the self-emanation of God into the world. Nickson’s Christology is very clearly based on the Nicene Creed, which is elaborately paraphrased in the final paragraph of Christ in Art, thus making a very clear (perhaps even half-defensive) statement of Christian orthodoxy.[12] The assignment of the attributes of Goodness, Beauty and Truth as personal characteristics of the Godhead is vital to Nickson’s aesthetics, which he saw agreed throughout all philosophy;
…if the ancient Philosophers looking into the Universe summed it up in its highest characteristics as Good, Beautiful, and True, we have there a consensus of belief authentic alike in the Christian, as well as in the Pagan sense. “The ideal of the Beautiful is the Fundamental of Everything in the world. We see only distortion of the Fundamental; but Art may lift itself into the height of the idea, and therefore is akin to Creation.”[13]
The artist must cultivate a disposition of mind wherein one learns to see clearly that all life “emanates from but One Source; that we brought our Music down with the rest of our Spiritual remains from a Kingdom of Glory in a pre-terrestrial Fall.”[14] Important to the cultivation of this clear vision is faith, for “the powers of the Artist reach their fullest extension only in the Christian Faith.”[15] Cultivating this disposition of mind is vital, for “In Art and Religion we realise an ideal world. By them we obtain a sanctified reason, an illumined imagination, a lofty and well disposed will.”[16] In a striking parallel to Plato’s views on art as expressed in Republic,[17] fine art created in this way realises its moral purpose in the creation of a redeemed society; one can hear Nickson’s own response to the Great War when he writes
There is a kingdom to be fashioned upon Earth, to counteract the civil warfare masquerading as enlightenment and progress: an edifice of Brotherhood; invisible in the heart of man; but visible as far as Personality can be objectified in acts, in manners and in things.[18]
The proposition that, in Nickson’s view, music is the highest of the fine arts comes from its essentially abstract nature. For Nickson the abstract attributes of Goodness, Beauty and Truth are personal characteristics of the Godhead; consequently, music could represent the personal attributes of God via an abstract medium comprehensible to the non-abstract senses. The essential problem offered by this proposition is that, in order to comprehend these abstract attributes it becomes necessary for the music to possess a program whereby the Divine presence might be perceived, and to provide one when it was not otherwise present. Nickson would construct a program in works that weren’t strictly programmatic, as related by Ronald Farren-Price, who recalls Nickson’s description of Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 14 No 2 as a depiction of marital bliss.[19]
Two works that highlight the underlying paradox in Nickson’s account of fine art come from the organ catalogue of the German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert, and were featured in the concert that crowned Nickson’s recital career, given in 1924.[20] Nickson and Karg-Elert had a friendship through correspondence that commenced in 1913 as a result of Nickson’s championship of Karg-Elert’s organ music through his recitals in Melbourne.[21] Surviving letters show that Nickson raised funds for the financially strained Karg-Elert following the collapse of the German currency after WWI – a controversial activity in view of post-war legislation that barred German nationals from entering Australia until 1925.[22] Nickson’s program notes for the concert are quite illuminating when read in conjunction with Christ in Art, which was published the following year. The final work on the program was the Interludium in F sharp (Op. 36 2B), Nickson wrote with reference to the work’s inscription;
This moving work is based on the last clause of the Catholic Creed, “et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.”[23] It needs no explanation. It rises towards the sublime. It is an anticipation of the patience of the Saints that keep the commandments of God and the Faith of Jesus; and of the new heaven wherein former things are passed away.[24]
This work satisfies all the criteria Nickson set down in Christ in Art, notably in making a clear statement of Christian orthodoxy, remembering Nickson’s statement in Christ in Art that “the powers of the Artist reach their fullest extension only in the Christian Faith.”[25] Karg-Elert’s music is distinguished by its suggestive titles, which convey a sense of program. Although the actual title of the work is Interludium, Karg-Elert’s use of the text from the Nicene Creed as an inscription provides the program that Nickson expounded: it is important to observe that Nickson’s program note is brief, and that it speaks directly of the music and not about the composer.
A work that demonstrates the paradox in Nickson’s aesthetics is the Seven Pastels from the Lake of Constance (op. 96), which Karg-Elert dedicated to Nickson. This is a sequence of tone poems about Lake Constance, where Karg-Elert stayed during the summer of 1921. The titles of the movements speak of a rather different program to the Interludium;
Psyche of the LakeLandscape in the mistA Legend of the mountainThe Reed-grown pondThe Sun’s night-songThe mirrored moon
Hymn to the stars[26]
The Pastels pose a significant paradox, as Nickson’s extended commentary shows. The movement titles suggest a mildly pantheistic program that is at odds with the clearly orthodox program implied in the Interludium. However, nationalist sentiment provides the way out, when in describing Karg-Elert Nickson contrasts him with his fellow-countrymen;
He has none of the folly of the super-man. Rather he represents his unfortunate country as its earlier idealists would have developed it, with their strong intuitive human sympathy…His exceptionally mystic idealism, wasted on the desert air, received instant recognition…in healthier and more fortunate lands. So his worth is in this, that he transcends the limits of Nationality, and appeals to the Allied countries that have retained their artistic sense, and their contact with the Divine.[27]
Nickson makes it clear that the Pastels are not literal representations of lake scenery, but symbolic of the lake itself, a reading supported by the titles of the movements. A rather cryptic note suggests the religious program Nickson found in the work when he writes that “the symbol in turn is sacramentally elevated by the artist’s prerogative into that of which it speaks – the Reality that true mystics ever seek.”[28] The paradox is in the application of a religious program to a work that cannot bear such a reading on its own: clearly the personality of the artist is what transforms the work from nature worship into nature-mysticism, although the use of the term ‘sacrament’ has more to do with how Nickson defines it in Christ in Art when he says that “Art, initiated as a Sacrament of the Manifest Presence, achieving victory where nature accepts defeat, hastens beyond the laggard pace of the tentative and the contingent, to catch up to the vision of the Eternal.”[29] The Anglo-Catholic understanding of the sacrament as a symbol under which God’s presence may be discerned is an important part of Nickson’s use of the term in this context. An important qualification in this is that the sacramental elevation of Karg-Elert’s tone poems comes from the composer’s personal endeavour; the agency of God is almost secondary, and this is where the Pastels fail. They make no clear statement of orthodoxy, although they employ what Nickson describes in the program notes as a highly symbolic tonal language. This may be susceptible to reinterpretation along Nickson’s theological lines, although this reinterpretation has to occur via the personality of the composer; as music, the Pastels do not stand alone, as was the case with the Interludium.
Christ in Art represents a unique synthesis of ideas. Nickson developed and taught his aesthetics at the oldest music school in the Australian universities, and through his long tenure was able to influence several generations of students. Vital to Nickson’s aesthetics is the development of a disposition of mind that enables the artist to see clearly that the world of sense is a symbolic representation of the truer reality of eternity, necessarily understood in highly abstract terms. Music occupies a high place in Nickson’s aesthetics, not only because he was a musician himself, but because it is an essentially abstract art form, and therefore more readily able to represent the absolute abstract realities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. This is highly conditional on the music possessing a program that somehow accommodates a clear statement of Christian orthodoxy; this is the paradox facing Nickson’s philosophy. When a strictly extra-musical signifier makes the statement, then the music stands alone, but in the absence of this signifier it became necessary for Nickson to construct a program in order to give the impression of the statement being made, and thus to satisfy his aesthetic requirements.
[1] For a variety of student reminiscences and responses, see Joan Bazeley, ed., Retrospections A. E. H. N. (Melbourne: Private printing, 1996).
[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] Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. 1, 2 vols. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966) pp 491-505.
[4] Since writing this paper I have had the opportunity of widening my perspective on this particular issue. I would not wish to be seen to be posing an absolute dichotomy here: theological liberalism was seen by both the Evangelical and Tractarian (i.e.: Anglo-Catholic) parties as a serious threat; it just happens that this sort of liberalism seems to have fared better at the High Church end of the spectrum.
[5] Howard Hollis, For the Anglican Historical Society, Chapter House, St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, 21st April 1993: Dr A. E. H. Nickson - the Man + Melbourne's Music, Unpublished MS lecture notes, Melbourne, p 7.
[6] William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism: Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford, 7th ed. (London: Methuen, 1932) p. 21-22.
[7] A E H Nickson, "Heart Beat:..." lecture notes, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 2.
[8] See Introduction, Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991).
[9] Plotinus, Quote from "Enneads", handout slips, typed and reno copied, Nickson Collection, PVgm, Box 2.
[10] A E H Nickson, Christ in Art (Melbourne: Diocesan Book Depot, circa 1925), p 6.
[17] Plato (circa 427-347BC), The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) pp 335-53.
[19] Bazeley, ed., Retrospections p 15.
[21] Harold Fabrikant, ed., The Harmonies of the Soul (Adelaide: Academy Music, 1996).
[22] Fabrikant, ed., Harmonies of the Soul p 7.
[23] And I look for the Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come. Amen.
[25] Nickson, Christ in Art p 18. Emphasis added.
[29] Nickson, Christ in Art p 7.
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