Alice Parker, whose arrangements of hymns, folk songs and spirituals were used in concert halls and churches throughout the United States, and who composed 11 song cycles and four operas, died December 24 at her home in Hawley, Massachusetts. She was 98 years old.
His death was confirmed by two of his children, Molly Stejskal and David Pyle.
Ms. Parker's easy-going renditions of traditional hymns such as “Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal,” spirituals such as “You Can Tell the World,” and Christmas carols and folk songs made her a trusted partner to choirs across the country.
For two decades he also worked with the most prominent American choir of his time, the Robert Shaw Chorale, collaborating with Mr. Shaw on hundreds of works.
The deep settings of poems by Emily Dickinson and Archibald MacLeish gave him a footing in the world of art song.
And her use of texts by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for an oratorio written for the anniversary of his death, “Sermon From the Mountain,” and by Eudora Welty for an opera premiered with Ms. Welty sitting in the La hearing in Jackson, Mississippi, testified to Mrs. Parker's broad humanist sympathies.
But it was his devotion to choral singing for eight decades and his conviction that community singing was a deeply human activity that gave him a distinctive place in American music. That devotion connected her to the earliest traditions of American organized music-making, congregational singing in the colonial churches that served the country's first composers.
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Trained in music at Smith College and Juilliard, Ms. Parker rejected the twelve-tone modernist orthodoxies of the mid-20th century in favor of an older modal approach.
The resulting simplicity in his choral compositions, whether his own compositions or other people's melodies, made his music accessible to the widest possible audience.
“She is a giant, she was a giant in the field of choral music,” said E. Wayne Abercrombie, professor emeritus of music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “She was incredibly focused on music at a basic level.”
“These were not professional choirs,” he added. “I was focused on making everyone sing. She would go to church for an hour or two and people would sing hymns.”
For Ms. Parker, singing had a deeper purpose than simply providing pleasure.
“When we sing something perfectly lovely together, not necessarily the B minor Mass or something that needs a lot of rehearsal, but a hymn, a folk song or a children's song, we sing it together and it really fits, and I have this wonderful feeling of brotherhood in the room,” he said in an interview with Newmusic USA in 2022.
Her affinity for the civil rights movement was influenced by these beliefs, as was her association with Mrs. Welty's Southern humanism. Ms. Parker adapted Ms. Welty's novella “The Ponder Heart” for an opera of the same name. She drew on Southern musical traditions (barbershop quartets, blues, gospel, scat singing) to produce “just the right tone” of heartfelt simplicity for Welty's work, in the opinion of the New York Times. Critic Edward Rothstein, reviewing the play's premiere in 1982.
“If all this had been more sophisticated, less basic, and more self-aware, the beating of that innocent Ponder heart might have sounded incredible,” Rothstein wrote.
Like his previous operas, two of them based on religious themes, this one featured the basic orchestration and easy melody that were distinctive characteristics of his work.
Parker acquired his “simple” style after having overcome, in an internal struggle that lasted years, what the academy had tried to impose on him.
For years, “I didn't compose anything,” he said. “And when I finally started again, it was stuff for the children's choir, because then I had no responsibility to write the music of the future,” he rejected modernist styles.
“Once that dam inside me broke, after three or four years, I was writing entire cantatas, entire musical suites, finding wonderful poetic texts that I wanted and could set,” he added. “I heard the music in the poetry as I read it.”
Alice Stuart Parker Pyle was born on December 16, 1925, in Boston, the daughter of Mary Shumate (Stuart) Parker, who founded a plastic laminate company, and Gordon Parker, a businessman who imported hardwood. She sang and played the piano from an early age; she graduated from Smith College with majors in organ and composition in 1947 and studied choral conducting with Robert Shaw and Julius Herford at the Juilliard School, from which she graduated in 1949.
His subsequent association with Mr. Shaw resulted in numerous albums of popular songs and hymn arrangements. “They are written so that amateur singers can sing them, but professionals can take them to a different level,” Abercrombie said. “That's a real gift.”
Mrs. Parker married a fellow Robert Shaw Chorale singer, the baritone Thomas Pyle, in 1954. He died in 1976.
Mrs. Parker is survived by her five children, Molly Stejskal, Katharine Bryda and David, Timothy and Elizabeth Pyle; a sister, Mary Stuart Parker Cosby; 11 grandchildren; and 6 great-grandchildren.
Immediately after Dr. King's assassination in April 1968, the Franconia Mennonite Choir commissioned him to write a play to commemorate him. “Central to understanding the man and his mission must be the realization that he took the Sermon on the Mount with complete and terrifying literality,” he wrote in the article's notes.
In a 2020 documentary about her by filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley, Parker recalled her gratitude for receiving the Mennonite order as a distraction from her own pain. “I can only write because I sense a need,” she told Montes-Bradley. “I can't write for a concert.” In this case her need was partly his.
In 1984, Ms. Parker founded a choir, Melodious Accord, with whom she made more than a dozen choral albums. In the following decade, she returned permanently to the farm that had been her childhood summer home in Hawley, in the hills of western Massachusetts, after having lived for many years in New York. She focused on teaching and singing at her church.
“What she was able to do was bring out the music in us,” recalled the Rev. Allen Comstock of Charlemont Federated Church in Hawley. He remembered the hundreds of people who came to his workshop. They sat with her for a week, he said, to listen and learn.
Although she focused on the joy of singing, Ms. Parker was deeply affected by tragedy, especially the deaths of Dr. King and her husband. This desperation emerged in her later work, particularly a dark song cycle set to poems by Emily Dickinson, “Heavenly Hurt” (2016). Dickinson was an “obsession” of hers, she told Montes-Bradley.
She and Dickinson, Parker told the filmmaker, had been “shaped by something in the soil of New England that seems to be concerned with big questions: life and death, love and suffering, joy and sadness.”
