Windham High School Choral Director to retire after four decades

By Erin Rose

After almost four decades of directing, a beloved educator from Windham High School is hanging up his teaching baton.

After four decades of teaching music at Windham High
School and leading the Windham Chamber Singers as
director, Dr. Richard Nickerson is retiring at the end
of the school year. COURTESY PHOTO  

Dr. Richard Nickerson, the high school’s Director of Choral Music, will retire in June, concluding 39 years dedicated to the singers who have passed through the school.

“I’m not going to lie and say that retirement was an easy decision,” he said. “I still love everything about my job. I just felt it was time.”

“It’s going to be an adjustment, for sure,” Nickerson said. “I have met the most incredible kids.”

One of the biggest successes of his time at the high school is the development of the Windham Chamber Singers, who have performed at the White House and Carnegie Hall and notably won the Prize of Vienna at the 25th International Youth and Music Festival in Vienna, Austria in 1996.

“What was so unique about that is we recorded a CD of Christmas music and had this naïve goal that if we could sell 10,000 copies, we could pay for everybody in the choir to go to this competition,” Nickerson said, explaining that the group had had five weeks to complete the task. “I didn’t realize at the time how naïve that was.”

They not only achieved their goal of attending the competition but also took home the international prize.

“The Windham Chamber Singers has developed an identity of its own,” Nickerson said.

Looking back on the years since the group was founded in the fall of 1988, Nickerson is proud of the high standards to which the group holds itself, and how incoming classes continue to maintain that tradition.

“One of the things that I love about that group is the standard we uphold. The kids hold themselves to a standard,” he said. “A student one time was being interviewed on a news program, and the reporter asked her, ‘isn’t it a big job to fill these shoes in the Windham Chamber Singers’ and she said it was ‘more intimidating because we’re tasked with holding that reputation and fulfilling that reputation.’ Kids come into the group with an idea that they’re going to be held to a certain standard, and I think that’s so important today.”

“It took me some time to understand that when you create something and it’s so successful, just because you created it, it’s not yours. It belongs to everyone,” Nickerson said. “It’s time now for me to step away and trust that what we’ve built is strong enough to go on.”

The group’s new director, the school’s Director of Choral Music, will be announced once they are presented to the Windham Raymond School Board at an upcoming meeting.

“It’s important to say that I was not involved in that process at all, which is how it should be,” Nickerson said. “I think there was a perception out there that I got to pick my own successor, and that’s not the case with any teaching job.”

“The Windham Chamber Singers is all of us, and their task now is to make sure this continues,” he said. “They have the power to support the new director and encourage and utilize that positive interaction that we’ve focused on for so long.”

The group’s American Holiday Family concert series has become a holiday tradition after 24 years, and the turnout for this past year’s event moved Nickerson.

“We had one of our most successful American Holiday Family concerts ever, with Broadway star Norm Lewis coming back for an unprecedented fourth time,” he said. “It was emotional because that’s one of the traditions that we’ve created and that’s a tradition that not only we look forward to, but our whole community looks forward to.”

Before his retirement is official, Nickerson will host one last Windham Chamber Singers event, as more than 250 past members of the group will return for a reunion concert at Windham High School on Saturday, June 27. 

“My wife asked a while ago if I wanted a retirement party,” he said. “I said what I really wanted is a retirement concert, so we’ve invited back every Windham Chamber Singer who has ever worn the uniform.”

“That will be my last thing as director,” he said, noting that the concert “sold out rather rapidly. It’s going to be pretty special.”

Community is one of the things that drew Nickerson to teaching, and his time in Windham allowed him to connect beyond just the students he guided.

“I think my fondest memories are of the thousands, which blows my mind saying that, of people I have met,” he said. “When a student comes into a music classroom, they’re usually not coming in for one year,” adding that in Windham, students are typically in the program for four years.

“In that time, you also get to know the parents, the siblings, the grandparents,” Nickerson said. “The focus of what I’ve done has always been community and human interaction.”

Retirement however does not mean that life will slow down for Nickerson. He will continue his participation in numerous groups outside of the high school, including his role as Artistic Director of the Maine Music Society, and guest appearances with other organizations.

“I’m looking at next year and I’m already busier than I am right now,” he said. “The thing is – I’m retiring from teaching, not from what I do. I still have an adult group in Lewiston, I’ve got a very full schedule of guest conducting, and workshops and adjudications. I’m going to be as busy as I’ve been, but I now have the freedom to travel at times when I couldn’t have.”

Life after retirement will also include time with his family, as it expands with a new grandchild and more on the way and travel with his wife, Linda.

“We love to travel, and that doesn’t always work with a teacher’s schedule, because you’re limited to when you can travel” he said. “Just after school starts in the fall, my wife and I are going to go to Paris for a while.

“The day after the reunion concert, we are heading up to Danforth on Grand Lake and are going to spend a week in pretty much total isolation,” Nickerson said.

Nickerson also recently achieved a lifelong goal of publishing a book, “Have Fun and Try Not to Mess Up,” a memoir of his time in the classroom including notable moments with students and lessons he learned on his journey as a teacher. It was started during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Nickerson had to determine how to continue choral education through a computer screen.

“Essentially, it started out with me writing because I was so angry during COVID for not being able to do what I do, but then I just started writing about the many lessons I have learned from my students, and the different stories and experiences,” he said. “It was a bucket list for me to release a book and to get that out, it was such a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.”

After 40 years in the classroom, interacting with generations of students (with some students “well into their 50s,” Nickerson says), the educator is frequently asked how children have changed over the years.

“My answer is that the kids haven’t changed. They haven’t changed at all,” he said. “When I started teaching, kids were unsure of who they were as they tried to navigate the difficult world, and they liked to challenge adult authority.”

“And today, kids are unsure of who they are as they navigate this difficult world and still like to challenge authority,” Nickerson said. “I think a lot of times, kids get a bad rap because kids become the victims of the choices adults make, and we blame it on the kids. That’s really not fair.” <