Alice Parker

Alice Stuart Parker Pyle (December 16, 1925 – December 24, 2023), known professionally as Alice Parker, was an American composer, arranger, conductor and teacher.''The Greenfield Recorder'', "Remembering Hawley’s Alice Parker, 'a legendary figure in choral music'"
December 28, 2023. Retrieved December 29, 2023.''The Washington Post'', "Alice Parker, choral composer who celebrated beauty and unity, dies at 98"
December 29, 2023. Retrieved January 1, 2024.
January 10, 2024. Retrieved January 11, 2024.

Early life and education

Parker was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1925, to Gordon Parker, who worked in the hardwood business, and Mary Shumate Stuart, who founded and directed a plastics laminate company. She grew up in Boston and Winchester, Massachusetts.

After studying music theory with Mary Mason at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Parker attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1947 with a double major in organ and composition. She then spent a summer at Tanglewood, studying with the conductor Robert Shaw, with whom she went on to have a long and prolific association, and Julius Herford, before beginning a graduate program in choral conducting at the Juilliard School in New York City.

Career

Having begun her career as a high school teacher, Parker also collaborated with Robert Shaw on arrangements of materials to be recorded by the Robert Shaw Chorale, and was featured alongside other singers on the front cover of ''Newsweek'' on December 29, 1947.

In addition to her work with the Chorale, Parker wrote a total of 5 operas, 11 song-cycles, 33 cantatas, 11 works for chorus and orchestra, 47 choral suites, and more than 40 original hymns. She also arranged spirituals, hymns, and folk songs, including French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Ladino folk songs, many of which have become part of the repertoire of choirs around the world.

Having divided her time between a New York apartment and her home in Hawley, Massachusetts, Parker decided, at the age of 70, to move permanently to Singing Brook Farm in Hawley, which her father had purchased in 1920 and where she had spent her childhood summers. In Hawley she founded the professional choir Melodious Accord in 1985, with which she released 14 albums and established a fellowship program to enable mid-career musicians to study with her. Parker attended the Federated Church in nearby Charlemont, Massachusetts, and assisted with its music program.

Honors and awards

Parker served on the Board of Directors of Chorus America and was their first Director Laureate. She received the Distinguished Composer of the Year award from the American Guild of Organists in 2000, the 2014 Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association, the Harvard Glee Club Foundation Medal in 2015, six honorary doctorates, and the Smith College Medal, as well as many other awards. She was a Fellow of the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada, and was awarded grants from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the American Music Center. She was also honored by the International Emily Dickinson Society for her choral suite ''Heavenly Hurt''.

In 2020 a documentary film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley was released, entitled ''Alice: At Home With Alice Parker''. Produced by HFP in association with Melodious Accord, Inc., it focuses on Parker's formative years and her collaboration on texts by Martin Luther King Jr., Archibald MacLeish, Eudora Welty and Emily Dickinson. It was selected for the 2020 Virginia Film Festival.

Personal life and death

In 1954 Parker married Thomas F. Pyle (1918−1976), a baritone soloist and member of the Robert Shaw Chorale, with whom she had two sons and three daughters. Following his death from a heart attack, a choir made up of 400 of his acquaintances sang Brahms's '' A German Requiem'' at his memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Parker died at her home in Hawley on December 24, 2023, at the age of 98.

Selected works

Operas

Original songs or arrangements

Books

References

External links

Alice Parker's official homepage

Alice Parker papers
Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland Libraries
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Parker, Alice
1925 births
2023 deaths
People from Hawley, Massachusetts
Musicians from Boston
Smith College alumni
Juilliard School alumni
Classical musicians from Massachusetts
20th-century American women musicians
21st-century American women musicians
20th-century American conductors (music)
21st-century American conductors (music)
American women conductors (music)
American classical composers
American women classical composers
American women music educators
American women hymnwriters