FOR RELEASE
Dec 8, 2000

Composer/Conductor Alice Parker Celebrates 75th Birthday

New York, NY, -- If you have sung in a school glee club or church choir during the past 60 years, you have more than likely been moved by the musical compositions and arrangements of Alice Parker. Ms. Parker, still very busy composing and conducting, has had a banner year this year, her 75th birthday year. She maintains a musical work schedule that is daunting.

From March through October, Alice Parker has conducted a recording session, presented workshops, and directed performances (2 premieres) in New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Washington State, North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Virginia and California as well as in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and Innsbruck, Austria.

In June she was honored by Chorus America; in fact, most of the convention program was devoted to honoring Alice Parker for the unique and extensive contribution she has made to choral music in the 20th Century.

In early July, the American Guild of Organists awarded Ms. Parker its Distinguished Composer Award at its biennial convention. Philip Hahn, President of the AGO, called this a "lifetime achievement award of sorts", saying that "Alice Parker has taught us to listen, to hear what the music is trying to say."

The Hymn Society of the United States and Canada, at its convention in Boston this July, also honored Alice Parker as a Fellow of the Hymn Society for her outstanding contribution to hymnody and to congregational singing.

The National Endowment for the Arts granted $25,000 to Melodious Accord in 2000 for Alice Parker to record CD's of various arrangements by Ms. Parker and the late Robert Shaw.

Since the death of Robert Shaw in 1999, Alice Parker is the most widely recognized personage in choral music. For close to 60 years her arrangements for choruses of folk songs, love songs, spirituals and hymns have been sung by generations of high school and college students and church choirs around the world.

Alice Parker began composing as a child and wrote her first orchestral score during her high school years. At Smith College and the Juilliard School, Alice Parker studied composition and conducting with Vincent Persichetti. While at Juilliard, Parker began her long association with Robert Shaw which led from the initial arrangement collaboration for the Robert Shaw Chorale to commissions by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She has composed in all choral and vocal forms from solos to small ensembles, cantatas to operas, sacred anthems to songs on texts by distinguished poets. Her composition commissions number in the hundreds.

Parker, who made New York City her home for nearly 50 years, now works as well out of her western Massachusetts studio. Her husband, the late Thomas Pyle, was contractor for most of the professional choral performances and recordings in New York City from 1948 to 1976; they had five children. Ms. Parker shares her December 16th birthday with Ludwig van Beethoven.