Alice Parker

Alice Parker studied at Juilliard School and Smith College. Training under Robert Shaw, Julius Herford and Vincent Persichetti is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are choral music, opera, art song and vocal music. Employment is recorded with Robert Shaw Chorale and Westminster Choir College.

• Name — Alice Parker • Birth Name — Alice Stuart Parker • Born — 16 December 1925 • Birthplace — Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. • Died — 24 December 2023 • Place of death — Hawley, Massachusetts, U.S. • Years Active — 1947–2020 • Occupation — * Composer • Arranger • Conductor • Teacher

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.

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.

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.