to retire this spring

Bill Thomas, Director of Furman Chamber Choir

John Beckford, Professor of Music

Changing the Guard

Furman will have lost almost two centuries’ worth of teaching experience when department giants Beckford, Thomas and Hicken retire this spring.

BY RON WAGNER ’93

John Beckford was ready to accept a position as Furman’s first fulltime percussion instructor in 1976, but there was a problem. He solved it by playing some good old-fashioned hardball.

“The salary seemed a little on the low side, and I tried to negotiate it up,” Beckford remembers with a laugh. “And they met me halfway.”

Fresh off earning a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Iowa and facing a job market with a grand total of eight open positions for full-time college percussion instructors nationwide, Beckford was blissfully unaware of just how spectacularly he may have been overplaying his hand. But Furman agreed to an extra $250 – a year – to secure his move south, and that investment has paid off handsomely in the form of someone who played a huge role in building the top-notch music department Gordon Blackwell ’60 envisioned when he returned to lead his alma mater after six years as the president of Florida State University.

Now, 43 years later, Beckford is retiring at the end of the academic year. So are fellow music faculty members Bill Thomas and Les Hicken, 12 months after Ruby Morgan and Bruce Schoonmaker also departed, taking with them 190 years of combined teaching experience in the Furman music department.

That’s quite a hit. Chair Mark Britt knows the Daniel Music Building halls will never be the same.

“In many ways we’ll feel the impact for years to come,” he says. “I don’t know if you could look at any single thing that’s most difficult to replace, but they’ve helped shape the department. We owe it to them to do our best to keep it moving in the right direction.”

Legendary Professor of Piano Morgan was at Furman for 50 years, while Schoonmaker taught voice for 41. Thomas, the department chair for 17 years, is in his 30th year, while Hicken’s 26 years qualifies him as the greenhorn of the bunch.

Beckford’s tenure included a stint as vice president for Academic Affairs and dean. That’s quite a long way from starting out as the assistant marching band director and overseeing record collection, among many other things, but he returned to the classroom in 2016 after eight years as dean.

A story about how he prepared for a job in administration explains why. One of his former students, David Belcher ’79, had risen to the ranks of provost at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Beckford reached out for advice. Belcher was “so generous with how he reviewed my application materials, helped me strategize, warned me of the pros and cons of what administration life was really all about,” Beckford remembers before his eyes fill with tears as he recounts Belcher’s death from brain cancer in June.

Les Hicken, Director of Bands

“I’m sorry. It’s still fresh,” Beckford says. “There was a student that ultimately became my teacher. The reward of having that cycle around so that ultimately your students become people that you can learn from is one of the great rewards.”

Thomas is spending his final fall in Arezzo, Italy, with the “Music in Italy” study away program he created, which is now in its 14th year. Spending a semester away from campus is uniquely difficult for music majors because of the sequential structure of their curriculum, and giving them the opportunity to experience that like the rest of the student body is the one of the highlights of his time at Furman.

“It has just been a wonderful, wonderful addition,” he says. “The students who come through this semester come back to Furman seeing the world in different ways, and their musicianship and their awareness as human beings and citizens is just so far ahead of when they left.”

Thomas teaches studio voice and vocal pedagogy. He moved to Greenville originally to be the minister of music at downtown’s First Baptist Church, but it wasn’t long before a part-time job at Furman became full time. Thomas went on to be the first director of the Furman Chamber Choir and helped establish the Festival of Lessons and Carols as part of Christmas at Furman, which has become a popular annual tradition for many people.

He also played a critical role as a member of the building committee for the Daniel Chapel.

“It just makes me smile,” Thomas says of seeing Daniel Chapel. “I think the chapel at Furman is one of the best places in the southeast for choral music.”

Hicken has directed the wind ensemble, symphonic band and chamber wind ensembles as well as serving as assistant director to the marching band. Top memories for him professionally include Furman playing at the American Bandmasters Association in 2010 and the wind ensemble performing at Carnegie Hall in 2008 (where it will return this year) and Symphony Hall in Chicago in 2013.

Personally, though, nothing tops the time he got to spend with son Gordon ’08 and daughter Anna ’13 while they both came through the Furman music program. Gordon played for his dad in the Lakeside Concert Band for nine consecutive years starting in the eighth grade, while Anna, a cellist and art major, taught herself to play string base in order to perform in Hicken’s wind ensemble her last two years at college.

“I miss them. It was very special when they were here,” he says. “Anna was around constantly. She worked in the music department office. I saw her every day. She’d come by and stick her head in the door — it was very, very nice. It was.” Schoonmaker taught voice and directed the Lyric Opera. His last official day of work was July 31, and while he has not yet acclimated to his new life, Schoonmaker is ready to devote his energy to other artistic pursuits like completing a longplanned novel.

He spends little time pining over Furman, though there is already nostalgia for at least one lost thing: the relationships that bring out the best in everyone.

“I miss the outstanding students, and I had my share. They always challenged us to be our best,” he says. “And I miss the students who were substantive people, and they weren’t always the greatest vocalists … I miss that closeness and that ability to help them open themselves to life and to the art and to understand what it means to sacrifice for the art. I also very much miss my colleagues, because the music-marking and the art and the artistic end of it were just so much fun and fulfilling.”

Asked about any individual idiosyncrasies that will be retiring with the professors, and Britt comes up with the “Hicken sigh.” Those personal touches are what tie students, past and present, to Furman.

“I miss the outstanding students, and I had my share. They always challenged us to be our best.”

“The leadership roles that they took on, those are things that we have to cover. We have younger faculty ready to step up and assume those roles,” Britt says. “They’ll do that. But for our alumni, going back close to 50 years, that’s thousands of people that they’ve impacted. Their memory of the Furman music department is those people.”