Clarence Dickinson

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

Early life and studies Dickinson grew up in a religious family. His grandfather was minister Baxter Dickinson. His father, the Rev. William Cowper Dickinson, had grown up at Lane Seminary while Baxter Dickinson was codirector with Lyman Beecher; his father's childhood playmates were Lyman's children Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher. He was sixth cousin to poet Emily Dickinson, who corresponded with his father and sister.

When Dickinson was born, his father was pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Lafayette. They later moved to Cincinnati, where Dickinson had his first hands-on experience playing the organ, and began studying piano. When his father retired in 1887, the family briefly moved to Pasadena, California. He also studied with Otto Singer. 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. His wife Helen died in 1957. He remarried in 1963 to Lois Stice at Brick Presbyterian.

He played regularly at the World's Fairs, starting with Chicago in 1893 through Montreal's in 1967.

He and his first wife co-wrote a large amount of sacred music, as well as a general-audience music appreciation book titled Excursions in Musical History. 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.

Legacy A music festival in honor of Clarence Dickinson and in memory of his wife Helen Dickinson was held on April 27, 1958, in New York's Riverside Church. Many choirs, conductors, organists, and soloists participated, among them Virgil Fox and Leo Sowerby. Sowerby's organ work Eternal Light was written for the occasion and given its premiere by Dickinson. At this festival he was given the sobriquet the Dean of American Church Music.

The Journal of Church Music dedicated its October 1969 issue as a memorial to Dickinson.

His widow Lois donated his archives to William Carey College. After Lois' death in 1972, her sisters gifted the entire contents of Dickinson's study to the college. 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. Dithyramb by Clarence Lucas; Dickinson premiered it in 1911 at the dedication concert of the new Skinner organ at St. John the Divine. Victor Herbert's arrangement for male chorus of The Cruiskeen Lawn (dedicated to Dickinson and the Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York) In Springtime (published 1918) for organ by Lucien Gates Chaffin March in D minor (published 1923, op. 76a) for organ by René Louis Becker Christmas Cradle Song (1928) for organ by Alfrēds Kalniņš, a Latvian organist and composer who lived in New York from 1927 to 1933