Alice Parker, a prolific composer who embraced sparse and graceful musical traditions in more than 500 choral arrangements, spirituals and other pieces that often evoked the beauty of nature and the comforting harmony of worship, died Sunday at her home in Hawley, Mass. She was 98.
Her family announced the death but noted no specific cause.
Parker’s works have long been part of the repertoire in churches, choral societies and other venues around the world, making her among the most widely performed contemporary composers – with thousands of people or more probably hearing her work each week.
Her final composition, “On the Common Ground,” was finished in 2020 as her failing eyesight made it impossible to see the notes. It drew on two of her major influences over a seven-decade career: the contemplative tones of chants, and the call-and-response structure of traditional spirituals and gospel music.
The song appealed to a country deeply divided over politics and values, and sought to revisit the traditions of town meetings in Parker’s native New England to air and settle differences.
The soloist sings: Help me find the common ground
The chorus answers: Find the common ground, yes, the common ground
Then back to the soloist: Between the high and the low; between the poor and the rich
“When we sing something perfectly lovely together … and it really clicks, you have this marvelous feeling of brotherhood in the room,” Parker told New Music USA. “We are all human beings. We are all feeling this emotion together at the same time. And this is uniting us. We are not separate.”
The quest to explore the collective spirit of a chorus was at the heart of Parker’s musical identity. Instead of first providing the written score to singers, she wanted them to listen to her renditions and offer their own interpretations – in everything from the subtleties of tone to the inflection points on a vowel.
Hearing and repeating, phrase by phrase, was how a chorus turned the “black blobs” of musical notation into true song, she said.
“Music isn’t on the page,” she said in an interview aired on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2015. “It can’t be correct on the page, because there’s no sound on the page. It has to be correct to the song, correct to the ear.”
Parker carved her own path early on. As a music student at the Juilliard School in the late 1940s, she resisted (“like crazy,” she emphasized) the formal structure of 12-tone music, a style that builds a composition by combining all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a fixed order. The forces tugging at Parker were different: the simplicity of folk music and hymns, and the sounds and senses from her summers spent in western Massachusetts at her family’s property, named Singing Brook Farm.
She began to experiment with a pared-down musical palette. That led her to a choral impresario, Robert Shaw. First she was Shaw’s student, and later she formed a 20-year collaboration with his Robert Shaw Chorale.
After Shaw disbanded the chorale in 1965, Parker branched out in a range of styles including song cycles, cantatas and operas such as “The Martyrs’ Mirror” (1971) and “The Ponder Heart” (1982). Her themes stretched wide, taking inspiration from by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Mountaintop” speech, rural American folk dance, Shaker plainsong and Jewish traditions, as with “An American Kedushah” (1999).
She also reinterpreted poetry into choral arrangements. In “Honey, Pepper, Leaf-Green Limes” (2005) she imagined the sights and sounds of a Jamaica market based on verse by Agnes Maxwell-Hall. In “Dancing Songs” (2011), she used the poetry of Nancy Wood to celebrate womanhood.
Parker described the most successful of her compositions as reflecting a “heavenly hurt,” not connected to any specific religion but to a greater sense of spirituality and the shared human experience.
“Beauty awakens the sense, in us, of our vulnerability as human beings,” she said in a 2017 interview. “It’s why you feel like crying when you see a gorgeous sunset, or hear a Bach solo cello suite, or a gorgeous melody, or a little kid singing.”
Alice Stuart Parker was born on Dec. 16, 1925, in Boston and grew up in Winchester, Mass. Her father was in the hardwood business and purchased the property in Hawley in 1920; her mother founded and directed a plastics laminate company.
She graduated in 1947 from Smith College, where she studied organ and composition. At Juilliard, she received a master’s degree in choral conducting in 1949. The only job she could find after graduation was teaching at a high school. “That was a huge shock, and a wake-up call to what I had thought my future was going to be,” she recalled. She stayed two years.
Parker began directing choral groups and deepened her collaboration with Shaw’s ensemble. Their arrangement of the Gregorian melody “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” was among their most celebrated projects. Parker wed one of the chorale’s baritones, Robert Pyle, in 1954.
In 1985, Parker founded Melodious Accord, a nonprofit group that presents choral concerts and sponsors singing workshops and other classes. The Musicians of Melodious Accord, a 16-member chorus, released several albums, including a collection of folk song arrangements, “Transformations” (1991), and “Angels and Challengers: American Woman Poets” (2001), five choral suites by Parker.
Her books included “The Anatomy of Melody” (2006) and “The Melodious Accord Hymnal” (2010). For decades, she conducted seminars and hosted composers and singers for fellowships at the family farmhouse in the Berkshires.
Her husband died in 1976. Survivors include two sons, David Pyle and Timothy Pyle; three daughters, Katharine Bryda, Mary Stejskal and Elizabeth Pyle; a sister; 11 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Parker often described song as a great common denominator – a powerful gift humankind has bestowed itself.
“I think it is meant to unite us as human beings in a way that nothing else can,” she said.
“If we’re arguing with our rational minds, we’re talking about which divides us,” she continued. “If we are singing with our intuitive minds, we are concentrating on what unites us. Our common human experience and all life experiences can be sung about.”
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