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Choral music legend Alice Parker, whose work was frequently included in Twin Cities bands, died on Christmas Eve. She is 98 years old.
Her last work, “On the Common Ground,” premiered three years ago at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis.
Philip Brunelle, VocalEssence’s artistic director and founder and Plymouth church choirmaster, estimates that he has conducted more than 20 of Parker’s works as composer and arranger.
“Every choir director in high school, college and church knew Alice Parker,” Brunel said Tuesday. “She really wanted everyone to sing. She had such a grandmotherly charm.”
An NPR report celebrating her 90th birthday noted that she composed more than 500 pieces of music and arranged arrangements for a variety of ballads, hymns and hymns. She is best known for her 20-year collaboration with Robert Shaw, winner of 14 Grammy Awards and a 1991 Kennedy Center Award.
Parker grew up in Boston and was educated at Smith College and Juilliard, where he met Shaw.
“They were trying to get me to write 12-tone music,” she told NME last year from her home in Holly, western Massachusetts. “I resisted like crazy. I simply couldn’t do it. And I lived contentedly long enough to realize that I was right and they were all wrong, because what really lasts is not necessarily tonal music but modal music. .
“Somehow this strange mixture of whole tones and semitones is closer to musical truth than any system drawn by equal semitones or equal whole tones,” she said. “This is outrageous. Henry Ford made everything match up exactly. Things in nature don’t match up exactly. The leaves on the trees are all the same, they’re just different. The snowflakes are different. And the water always behaves differently. of.”
Brunel remembers getting a call from Parker during the pandemic.
“She’s very concerned about people turning against each other,” he said Tuesday. “She talked about the New England tradition where people would gather in the village square to discuss their differences, but we don’t do that anymore. She wrote Common Ground about that, but didn’t know what to do with it. I told you to send it to me.”
Since its debut at Plymouth Church it has been performed by a number of groups including the St Olaf Choir.
“When we sing some really cute songs together and really hit it off, you feel this amazing sense of brotherhood in the room,” she told NMU. “We are all human beings. We are all feeling this emotion at the same time. It unites us. We are not separate.”
Parker had five children with her husband, Thomas Pyle, who died in 1976.
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