Clarence Dickinson

Clarence Dickinson (May 7, 1873 in Lafayette, Indiana – August 2, 1969 in New York City) was an American composer and organist.

They later moved to Cincinnati, where Dickinson had his first hands-on experience playing the organ, and began studying piano.

The next year, he joined his family in Evanston, Illinois, and enrolled at Northwestern University, initially studying classics.

Here he played for 5 years, his stature growing thanks to media attention from Clarence Eddy and Wilhelm Middelschulte about his having given the first American organ concert from memory.

While in Berlin he was exposed to the musical luminaries of the day, including Felix Weingartner, Arthur Nikisch, Karl Muck, Richard Strauss, Siegfried Ochs, Busoni, and Josef Hoffman.

There were further engagements the English Opera Company, the Sunday Evening Club chorus, and the Temple Kehilath Anshe Mayriv.

They honeymooned in Europe, touring Cadiz, Tangier, and Cordova, and on this trip they began collecting folk songs together.

This led to him accepting an invitation to succeed Archer Gibson as organist and choirmaster at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, a post which he held for 50 years.

[4][3] He joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1912, where he remained until his retirement in 1945; he founded the institution's School for Sacred Music there in 1928.

While he composed large-scale pieces, including at least one organ symphony, he was better known as an arranger and pedagogue; his 1922 publication The Technique and Art of Organ Playing is a standard reference work which went through several editions in his lifetime, and he edited a general-use hymnal for the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America in 1933.

Late in life he and his wife collaborated on an edition of anthems written by early Moravian settlers in the United States.

The collection includes a desk that once belonged to his cousin Emily Dickinson, one of the rare surviving copies of Jeremiah Ingalls' A Songster's Companion, and correspondence with musical and church figures of his day.

The American Guild of Organists named the Clarence Dickinson Society, its legacy and planned giving program, in his honor.