‘Once I started playing the organ, I was hooked’: Beloved longtime minister of music Dick Matteson bids farewell

After 65 years playing and directing church music, 17 of those as First Church Amherst minister of music, Dick Matteson is ready to celebrate his legacy with the Pioneer Valley. He plans to retire next month, and a farewell concert will be held this Saturday, May 17, at 2 p.m.

Matteson grew up in an Episcopalian church-going home in Cohasset; his mother played the piano and violin, and, as a young child, he liked to play his family’s piano. His musical career allegedly began in earnest with an impromptu performance at a family friend’s wedding, according to a story his mom told him. At the age of 3, Matteson purportedly climbed onto a piano and played Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” (aka “Here Comes The Bride”) with two hands.

“I suspect that is not the truth,” he noted dryly. “It was probably hunt-and-peck.”

Still, his mother felt he needed piano lessons. She taught him briefly, but he started outside lessons at the age of 4. What he likes about the piano is its versatility: “You’ve got 88 keys, so you’ve got really low notes, you’ve got really high notes, and you put them together in combinations,” he said. “You can play softly; you can bang on it and play loud. And it became second nature to me very early.”

After seven or eight years of piano, he wanted to try something new: the organ, which he also found fascinating. He was able to take lessons with the choir director of their church at the time, and he played his first church service at the age of 12.

“Once I started playing the organ, I was hooked,” Matteson said. “It’s such a powerful, versatile instrument that it was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is so cool!’”

As an adult, he studied at Middlebury College for two years, but he didn’t like it: “It was out in the middle of nowhere, and in the winter, everybody went skiing, but I didn’t ski because I was afraid of breaking something so I couldn’t play the organ.” When he left, he auditioned for a music school in Boston but wasn’t accepted; the director of the school’s organ department recommended he go to The Hartt School, the conservatory of the University of Hartford, instead.

He ended up staying in Hartford for nearly 40 years. There, he met Rebecca Matteson, a fellow organist herself and his now-former wife. Though they didn’t interact until their second semester, they had, by happenstance, both auditioned for the school on the same day in 1967.

“Dick excels at community building,” Rebecca Matteson said. “He is outgoing, has a great sense of humor and can easily laugh at himself. He quickly learns names and really ‘sees’ each person in his choirs.”

When they were dating, Dick would introduce her to the women in the ladies’ group at his church (where, she said in an email, “It was clear they adored him!”), then playfully test her later to see which names and faces she remembered.

“That was a fabulous skill builder,” she said, “and I am still good with names!”

The two had a daughter, Laura Williams, who started learning piano at the age of 5, inspired by her dad.

“Traveling with my Dad from church to church when I was little and watching him play the organ made me want to take piano lessons,” she said. “He was so talented. I wanted to be just like him.”

When Matteson’s grandson, Cameron Williams, was very young, Williams’ parents were living in western Massachusetts, which made Matteson want to relocate to be able to spend more time with his family.

“I said, ‘Okay, I’ve done everything I can do in Hartford,’” he said. “‘I’ll go move closer.’”

Williams, now 20, is a student at Johnson & Wales University, where he’s the treasurer for the JWU Players, a student theater group, for which he recently directed a production of “Grease.” He, too, is a performer with a music background – as a child, he sang with a local children’s chorus and took part in community theater productions, sometimes with his parents. Since then, he’s also played guitar, drums, tuba, and trumpet, and he sings with the choir at First Church when he can.

Both of Williams’ parents are music teachers, but Williams said that his close relationship with his grandfather has had a fundamental influence on his own music career as well.

“He does this with any choir member or person he’s ever worked with in a musical: any time I needed anything, any help or any additional support, he was always there,” Williams said. “If I came over to his house, we could just putz around on the piano or sing or do whatever. It never felt like any work we were doing was actually work.”

After moving up to Massachusetts, Matteson worked as a choir director at the Community Music School Of Springfield and as an accompanist for the South Hadley Chorale and at the school now known as Western New England University. He worked as an organist at two other churches in the Springfield area before he heard that First Church was looking for a music director.

When he met with the search committee there in 2008, “I liked that they were open and affirming that they were accepting of everybody. Everybody was welcome here. Didn’t matter what you believed or if you didn’t believe anything at all – you were totally welcome here and you were welcome with open arms,” he said. Plus, as part of his audition, he had to teach the choir a new song, and the 26 choir members who showed up were “phenomenal. And I said, ‘This is a really good choir to work with.’”

He’s now been with that choir for 17 years.

“One of my strengths is building community,” Matteson said, “and my feeling is that if people who are, in this case, singing together have that sense of, ‘Everybody in the community is an intricate part of the whole, and we need to support each other and take care of each other and nurture each other’s abilities,’ the end product is incredibly strong.”

Matteson joked that there is a downside to having such a tight-knit choir: “They become so interwoven with each other that when they arrive at a rehearsal, it’s like they haven’t seen each other forever, even though they may have seen each other that morning, so they want to catch up. So it’s just a lot of talking,” he said. “But, to my way of thinking, if that’s the only flaw, if you will, it’s great because that sense of, we’re all in this together, we’re all going to work hard, we want to do the best we can do, etc., etc., – I think that’s super.”

Choir member Katie Tolles said Matteson “knows everybody in the congregation and seems to know how to make connections with everyone. He ministers especially to the choir by sending us birthday cards, holiday cards, sharing about his own life, and knowing and caring when each one of us might be going through something either difficult or wonderful. We laugh a lot together at rehearsals!” Through the music Matteson has directed and played, she said, “I think we have become more exuberant in our celebration of the holy.”

Both Matteson and Williams said that First Church is the most welcoming church they’ve ever been a part of.

“There are a lot of churches that say at the beginning of the service, every service, ‘Everyone is welcome.’ They do say it here, but you don’t have to say it here because you can feel it the moment you walk in,” Williams said.

“This is a very unique church. I have worked in Roman Catholic churches, I’ve worked in Congregational, Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran, and there’s just something very, very special about this place – which is one of the reasons I don’t want to retire,” Matteson said.

At 77 (soon to be 78), Matteson has had to slow down, partly due to age, and partly due to complications from treatment for back pain.

“The signal from the thing was, ‘Okay, you have arthritis in your back. You’re not getting any younger.’ Your body is telling you, ‘Time to slow it down,’” he said.

The Rev. Vicki Kemper, pastor of First Church, said that the church community understands that Matteson’s ready to retire. Still, she said, “While we miss him and all the gifts he has shared with us, he has left us stronger and better than when he arrived.”

Matteson had already known he would have to retire at some point, but he wanted to hit a specific milestone first: “When I looked at the calendar and when I started playing, I thought, ‘I gotta get to 65 years.’ There’s something magical about saying, ‘I’ve been doing this for 65 years.’”

Though his sendoff concert will be this Saturday, May 17, Matteson’s last Sunday service with First Church Amherst will be on June 29. After that, a new music director will take over. What advice does Matteson have for that person?

“Love everybody here and let them love you back, because that’s what this particular place is all about, and the music will happen,” he said.

After he retires, he’d like to write a book with some of the most memorable stories from his long career in church music – incidents from weddings, funerals, and the like. Outside of that, he’ll still be busy – he’s the president of his condo community, the director of a chorus at Loomis Village, and is involved with the South Hadley town government as well. He might take “a little part-time non-musical job” – something like working the checkouts at Big Y, even just a couple times a week – “just because it’s important for me to spend time with people.”

Still, he said, “For the months of July and August, I intend to take it very easy and not do much of anything.”

In the meantime, he has a show to prepare for: his farewell concert will be at First Church this Saturday, May 17, at 2 p.m. It’ll include music for the piano, organ, choir, and the audience; guest musicians will include pianists Linda Smith, Anne Stanek, and Gail Weirick, plus Rebecca Matteson on the organ. Admission is free, but donations will be accepted at the door.

Matteson’s goal in creating the concert wasn’t just to celebrate his own career – it was to give the choir another opportunity to perform for the public and showcase the church in doing so. That includes featuring something “a little bit unusual and not done every day”: having multiple pianists playing one piano together.

It’s a fitting addition, though, for someone whose legacy at the church includes bringing people together. After a 65-year career, Matteson is rightly proud of the impact he’s had on First Church and beyond.

“When I think about the hundreds of people, both singers, instrumentalists, and if you look at all of it, on stage, in the church choir, in the community choir, in this and that and the other thing, and the thousands of people who have heard what we have done – I mean, it’s amazing.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].