There’s music in him, and Ian Wickett has been sharing it at St. John’s Anglican Church for 37 years.
Wickett was born in Victoria to a musical family.
He began taking piano lessons at the age of seven and was playing for the Sunday school in a Parksville church by the time he was 14.
“I think I was put in them rather than choosing, although I probably would have wanted to play anyway,” he says. “It’s just something we did.”
Wickett’s father played both piano and organ and his grandfather was an organist in a church in Torquay, England before moving to Victoria, where he taught music at the normal school.
While Wickett enjoyed taking piano lessons, practising was another story.
“As a young person I was supposed to, but hey, I was a young boy,” laughs the self-deprecating businessman. “The quality would be way higher if I did; it’s not dreadful but it’s not good.”
Nevertheless, when he was 16, Wickett took over playing the organ at a church in French Creek, located between Parksville and Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
“When the organist at St. Anne’s quit, my father said, ‘Why don’t you go play there?’ So I did.”
There’s an enviable air of nonchalance in Wickett’s description of the event, particularly since he did not play the organ.
“Not really, no, not too badly,” he replies when asked if the notion to play the organ for a congregation scared him when he had no previous experience. “You can take courses, I guess, or you can just learn it. I thought it was fine.”
Wickett explains the organ is more complicated and technique quite different from playing a piano.
“You don’t have sustained pedal like a piano, so if you want a sustained note you have to hold the key,” he says. “I got lots of tips from my father as time went on, on technique.”
Wickett says he has played on and off over the years, years that included a sojourn at the University of Victoria and a 10-year career with CIBC.
“When I was the manager of a branch in Fraser Lake, I played for the services there,” he says, bringing to mind his encounter with an “interesting” pump organ located in the unheated church.
“You had to be careful, because the reeds are held on with wax and quite brittle,” he says. “So when it’s cold, so you have to pump air gently through them until they are warmed up.”
Wickett brought his love of music to the Shuswap when he purchased the Salmon Arm Observer and moved his family to Salmon Arm.
“I like music; I like the beauty of it, I like the harmony and I like the making of it,” he says, noting he likes to be able to create those sounds and plays the recorder for those reasons.
Wickett says he is attracted to the discipline and almost meditative quality of playing piano.
“I can go play music for about an hour and feel quite refreshed,” he says. “Playing in church is much more complex, it’s like theatre production – all the interweaving of the music and the words and the action. It all has to come together.”
And when it does come together, and the congregation joins in, it adds a new dimension to the service, he says.
When he isn’t playing music, Wickett has music playing most of the time – primarily classical.
His favourite composers are mid-1700s types – George Frederic Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, Arcangelo Corelli, Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“I like the harmonies, the rhythms, the patterns of the multi-movement pieces, the quick and slow movements,” he says.
Although he figures people can usually do things if they set their mind to them, Wickett has no interest in exploring harmonies, rhythms and patterns of his own making.
“I’ve never had anything compelling that made me want to do it,” he says. “Another set of techniques that I don’t have right now that I’d have to learn.”
In terms of being familiar with a wide range of sacred music, Wickett Business Services owner says he is quite familiar with many pieces that are played in church, but many with which he is not yet familiar.
Always agreeable to learning new material, Wickett says he particularly likes the church festival seasons, such as Christmas and Easter – and particularly likes it when people sing.
On Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Sundays to come, Wickett will be up in the gallery playing the organ to enhance the Anglican order of service – something he plans to do for as long as the church is prepared to have him there and as long as he is healthy.
