My father was up at Oxford in the 1950s and his best friend was a chap called Dudley Moore; both bonding over their scholarships. Moore got in on the organ, which back then came with an odd perk: organists alone were allowed to sit the entrance exam for both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year. I mentioned this little vignette to organist David Hicken as we sat down for our interview, showing off my one and only organ knowledge. Turns out organists live in a small world, as he told me his own mother, 91 who was also his piano teacher in the US and who taught him since he was three years old, was also a friend of Dudley Moore’s!
Organ credentials laid down, I sat down to learn more about Chiang Mai’s one and only organist.
British born David Hicken didn’t learn the organ from his mother though. He was 12 and in a school chapel choir in England the day after the organ had been fixed when a guest player sat down and did something with it. “I heard him play and fell in love with it,” he told me. Church jobs from 14. Recitals from 16. And by 17 he had a big decision to make.
“If I could do it again I would probably have choosen to do Oxbridge,” he muses. “Kings College Cambridge specifically. Oxbridge had the finest organs in the world.” Instead he went to Peabody Conservatory, affiliated with Johns Hopkins, on a very generous scholarship that covered tuition, room and board, after meeting the professor of organs at a retreat in England. “It was something fantastic, and my whole family was moving to the United States,” he said, of the offer he apparently still second-guesses.
The pipe organ is the oldest instrument in continuous existence. There is music written for it going back to the mid-1400s. “Not good,” Hicken said, “but it does exist.” Before the mechanical clock, it was the most sophisticated machine anyone had built. “There is air that goes into the pipe and the keys open little pallets underneath the pipes, then you have stops which stop the air going into the pipe. Each pipe varies in length and changes pitch,” he explained to this organ Luddite.
It’s also a dying art, he explained, citing the sheer cost and access. A large pipe organ can run to a couple of million dollars; a small one for an ordinary church is two to three hundred thousand. So churches are switching to digital organs instead, sampled pipe sounds played back through speakers hidden inside the case — which is what Hicken has at home. “It is sad in one sense but it also opens up other possibilities too,” he said. “There are now thousands of organists in the world whereas seventy years ago there would have been hundreds of thousands.”
He has a theory about why churches are losing young congregants, and it isn’t the one clergy keep acting on. “The clergy thinks guitar will attract youth and they have been turning more and more from organs. But I don’t agree. That is not what is turning youngsters away.” He argues soberly, “It’s not the music.”
Hicken has played nearly every denomination there is. “The Catholics are the worst at gatekeeping music,” he said. “They believe there should be one cantor that leads the music, so organs are downplayed. Odd, as I would have thought the Catholics would embrace the pomp.” Episcopalians and Anglicans, he says, pay better. Lutherans “take music seriously and want good musicians.”
As far as he knows there are two organs left in the whole of Thailand, both in Bangkok. “One built in the 1800s, it still works but it’s out of tune. There’s another church with a hybrid instrument. As far as I know those are the only two organs in the whole country. Google it.” I did. He’s right.
Which makes Chiang Mai, a city with no organs at all, an unlikely place for an organist to want to live. Hicken doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t think that I can go anywhere else in the world that is such a desert for organs and organists,” he said with a wan smile — not a complaint, a compliment. He first came here 21 years ago, fell for it, and came back for good six and a half years ago, bringing his 91 year old mother with him and starting a family with a Chiang Mai woman. “I love the people. First and foremost. Food, climate.” Though born British, David spent most of his life living and working across the United States, mainly in hot climates, he points out, having lived in Hawaii, California and Florida. These places had “white noise” he said, which have now gone quiet since his move to Hang Dong.
He is Buddhist and has been since 14 — his mother and he worked through new age spirituality, Hinduism and Taoism before Buddhism was the one that stuck, “the concept of going within rather than looking for something in the exterior.” None of which stopped him spending thirty years employed by churches. “I had to lie to every church I went to,” he smiled. “Pretend I was religious.” He brought up the Vicar of Bray as a tongue in cheek reference, the satire of a clergyman who changed his convictions to suit whichever monarch was in charge. “I was very much into the music and how it fit into the Christian beliefs, but it never fit with my worldview.”
By the end of his American career he was running three services every Sunday morning, one more on Saturday evenings, plus a full roster of students. “I burnt out doing it all in America,” he said. Chiang Mai gave him “the luxury of not needing to do any of that.”
What replaced the churches for Hicken was, unexpectedly, YouTube, which happened more or less by accident. An arrangement of Carol of the Bells, filmed in Hawaii, took off — eight million views on that video alone. The channel is currently past 100,000 subscribers and 63 million total views. “YouTube is my performance platform,” he said. “I can reach much more.” What it actually sells is sheet music, around 200 pieces of it, PDFs off his own website. “Students buy it for recitals, teachers buy it for their students.” Trinity College London has picked two of his pieces for an upcoming grade syllabus. His choral work has been performed at the Vatican, Canterbury Cathedral and Carnegie Hall. “Twenty years ago I was giving concerts all over the place,” he said. “I enjoy performing but there is a lot involved with maintaining a programme. Ultimately I make a lot more money from composing than performing.”
At home he has a trio of instruments: a Viscount organ made in Italy, a Shigeru Kawai grand piano from Japan, and a digital harpsichord. “I do all of the recordings myself,” he said. “I don’t need to go anywhere else.”
David Hicken Playing the piano
I asked how he actually composes. He pointed me toward something he’d written on the subject for another interview, and it is worth quoting at length. “Everything begins at the instrument,” he writes. “I sit down at the keyboard and start to play, not with a plan, but with a sense of openness.” Ideas, he says, don’t arrive finished. “They emerge gradually through this interaction with the instrument. A particular chord might stand out, or a short melodic phrase might feel like it has something about it. When that happens, I stay with it.”
Every piece starts as a feeling rather than an idea. “It might be something cinematic, or something more intimate and reflective, but there is always an emotional centre that guides everything that follows.” He writes it into the notation software Dorico as it comes, “constantly moving between playing and reading, adding things, removing things, refining what is there. It often feels more like sculpting than composing. I am not building something from the ground up in a rigid way, but rather uncovering something that is already there.”
The finished piece, he admits, rarely resembles the one he started with. “An idea that seemed central at the beginning might disappear entirely, while something that felt small at first can grow into the main theme. I have learned not to hold on too tightly to the initial idea.” And the mindset matters more than the method, he says. “I do not approach composition as a problem to be solved, but as something to be experienced. There has to be a sense of enjoyment, curiosity, and even a bit of discovery.” Or, as he puts it at the end of that piece: “It is about sitting at the instrument, listening carefully, and allowing something meaningful to emerge.”
He is careful, too, about where he won’t go for material. While Chiang Mai and Thailand inspire him, Chiang Mai’s own musical traditions, the local scales and structures, don’t make it into his work. “That music doesn’t mesh with the classical stuff,” he said. “No cultural appropriation here.”
His daughter, 21, luk krung, plays clarinet and piano and has a diploma in music. She isn’t pursuing it. Given everything above, that might be the sanest decision in the whole family.
Two organs in the country and neither one in tune. Hicken doesn’t seem bothered by that in the slightest.
Listen to Chiang Mai Rhapsody, written as an ode to Chiang Mai: https://youtu.be/46fL32rYlog?si=cN7zHO2HlZTSa2U0
Many of his beautiful pieces are available on his You love channel.
