NZOrgan Tributes, March 2010

Allan Wicks lectures students on the lawn of Addington Palace in 1981
      

“You Won't Forget Him in a Hurry”

Dr Allan Wicks, some time Organist & Master of the Choristers at Canterbury Cathedral. Born in Yorkshire, 1923, died on 4th February 2010 at the age of 86. Acclaimed recitalist and champion of contemporary music, and regarded as one of the most inspiring, inspired and charismatic organist/choirmasters of the 20th century.

“You won't forget him in a hurry” director of the RSCM, Lionel Dakers, told us.

'We' were the assembled students for the annual 6-week summer course for overseas church musicians at Addington Palace, and word had it that Dr Wicks was THE person in the English church music scene. He was erudite, inspirational, exacting, an acclaimed recitalist with phenomenal skill and had been Organist and Master of the Choristers at Canterbury Cathedral since 1961. He was obviously brilliant. He was a God. I was terrified.

With all the innocence and gall of youth I wrote back home to New Zealand of my increasingly delighted impressions of this wonderful man and his effect on us during one week. And here they are, warts and all:

“Monday, August 3, 1981 , Dr Wicks bounced into Addington Palace for the first of his lectures which began with the subject The Reality of Art. I had imagined him to be a bit stuffy, uppity and limited to his only one sphere of interest, i.e. music. Just the opposite. In his 60s, Allan had the enquiring mind of a child and the wisdom to absorb and use information carefully – apart from that he was very human. He could talk on almost any subject but preferred to listen, and spent many hours with us just chatting in the common room or over a cup of tea on the landing, late into the night. The first lecture was a bonanza – so provocative that he upset X who rudely stormed out in the middle of it, but that was X's fault, not Allan's. We were in for a very vital and interesting week! After coffee it was back to singing, this time another full-scale Victoria mass in Latin. Years of coping with choirboys and men at Canterbury had armed Allan well for coping with a mixed bag of voices like ours and at the finish of just one session we even began to think that we weren't so bad after all.

Tuesday, 4th: Allan set the ball rolling today with a routine lecture on The church musician and practical theology. He was as well-up in his theology as everything else, it appeared. He told us that he gives potential choirboys an official, expertly designed series of tests along with I.Q. tests and so on before admitting them to be personally auditioned for musical ability. One of these tests involved differentiating between sounds, and just for fun, Allan made himself and his wife do them. His wife fared fairly well, but Allan's results showed he had “only some musical ability”. He thought this was enormously funny. He said it proved to him that tests only told so much, and for the rest, he always accepted choirboys who had a certain sparkle in their eyes – a gamble that always paid off.

Wednesday, 5th: Morning off, spent in London. The bus back to Addington was full of stoically sweating poms who looked thoroughly miserable in this intense and unusual heat wave. I was back just in time for Allan's lecture on Tradition and the Great Composer. It was so hot that the class had to be moved from the lecture room to the lawn outside, under the shade of the massive cedar tree, whose huge branches formed a canopy over us. Even there it was steaming hot but Allan ploughed on in fine style, tracing the development of music through the ages and through different countries. He could really cover a lot of ground in a short time, that man. But can I remember it?

Allan Wicks (left, in blue) with Juliet Dakers (right, in white top) teach an eightsome reel

[Later that evening] If the Dakers family was a lively enough package, put them with Dr Allan Wicks and you had an explosion of activity. They decided some Scottish country dancing would help finish the day off nicely, now that evening was coming on and temperatures were dropping into the 20s. We learnt a kind of eightsome reel that night, using a tape recorder plugged in through a below-ground window. It was frenetic dancing and exhausting to the point where we feared for Fred's health. I took photos with my ailing camera, and in the twilight of 9.30pm we are barely visible, but by then we were also barely mobile - except for Allan. It was enormous fun, and others joined in from time to time to give the dancers a rest. All this lent itself to a very happy air in the palace.

Thursday 6th: The afternoon session was Allan on Training and selecting choirboys for Canterbury Cathedral. One of his methods of disciplining his boys if they misbehave is to throw rubber chickens at them from the organ loft. I wonder if any tourist has been alarmed by the sight of a flying rubber chicken in the hallowed confines of Canterbury Cathedral. He also dealt very sensibly with choirboys who got fidgety and restless: he would force march them, in line, to the West door, then shout “Follow me” at the top of his lungs, and take off at full speed. It was up to the boys to follow – through gateways, under hedges, in and out of shops, until the boys were exhausted and he led them, running, back into their pews in the quire. They paid attention and sang superbly after a good work out like that, he claimed.

Allan said it was often tricky getting the right effect in sound with very small boys. Once he wanted them to sound terrified – scared to death in fact. Nothing he could do was getting the required effect, so he told them a long tale about a terrible, wicked man who had a hook for a right hand (Captain Hook comes to mind). Come the day for the performance of this scary work, Allan got up to conduct his boys wearing, as usual, his long-sleeved surplice. As he raised his arm for the down-beat, his sleeve fell away and the boys saw at once he had, not a right hand, but a HOOK! The resultant singing was marvellous and the boys sprang into action, scared out of their wits. But his care of the boys was genuine. No matter how a boy behaved, looked, sang or spoke, Allan always tried to remember that every boy was somebody's dearly loved son, and that Allan had no right to treat him as anything else. A most impressive man.

Saturday, 8th: A "Come and Meet Allan Wicks" public day began at 10am with a head-on tackle of Vaughn-Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem and a Stravinsky Mass. At sight. Phew. It was possibly the hardest session of the whole course as both were pieces with peculiar harmonies and modulations that were hard to pitch correctly. To complicate matters, rhythms were extraordinary and there were up to eight parts going at the same time. I chose to be a second alto, hoping to hide in the middle of all the other voices around me, but it was even harder than being a mainline soprano. We often found ourselves having to pitch notes that were a semi-tone or tone away from notes in other parts on either side of us. Allan was fantastic and no-one could help but be impressed by his straight-forward control and musical leadership of this braying cacophony. He brought it all together for a final performance in the Great Hall which evoked no thunderclaps from the god of musical attainment. We were just relieved to have got through it. As we took to our beds, exhausted, Allan left quietly to return to his beloved Canterbury Cathedral and its choristers.”

Yes, you were right Lionel. We haven't forgotten him - and it certainly won't be in a hurry.

Jenny Setchell, March 2010

Allan Wicks, partnering Elisabeth Dakers, with daughter Juliet Dakers behind them

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