Alice Parker Pyle
December 16, 1925 – December 24, 2023
In all honesty, this writer was hesitant to compose a tribute for Alice Parker. One can surf the web and find numerous sites and YouTube videos that honor Alice and offer a more in-depth reflection than I am able to provide. Likewise, there are performances of her music, interviews, and brief documentaries available online that celebrate her numerous accomplishments and her distinctive approach to communal singing. I encourage all to explore!
However, I did have the pleasure of working with Alice on a number of occasions. Most notably, I served on the committee for a choral festival for the Archdiocese of Chicago Office for Divine Worship in the 1980s at which Alice was the guest conductor. The festival culminated in the celebration of the Eucharist; during the distribution of communion, Alice led approximately 1,000 singers in a medley of hymns: “What Wondrous Love,” “My Song Is Love Unknown,” and “How Firm a Foundation.” Without accompaniment, she wove the hymns together and gently moved us from one to the next creating an awesome and spontaneous experience. What a memorable moment! Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago resounded with the prayerful sounds of the human voice offering praise, but at the same time it seemed as though you could hear a pin drop! I can only imagine how many other fortunate people enjoyed a similar experience with this talented woman.
Alice travelled extensively throughout her life and well into her golden years; lecturing, leading workshops and hymn sings for professional organizations, churches, schools, and civic singing groups without regard for affiliation or denomination. Without a doubt, she was one of the most sought-after music clinicians in the country. In her retirement years, she hosted workshops for aspiring composers and other musicians in her home located in the tiny town of Hawley, Massachusetts. Before she was born, her father had purchased land in Hawley and her family enjoyed summers there. Though she spent her professional years raising her family in Manhattan, she admitted that Hawley was always her true home.
Alice Parker was among the most accomplished musicians in the post Vatican II era whether she was composing for the church, leading a congregation in song, or even singing in the pews. She was nurtured in a household where communal singing in church, at home, or in the car was taken for granted. Her list of academic accomplishments is stellar: Julliard, New England Conservatory, and Smith College. While attending a summer program at the Tanglewood Music Festival, she began an astonishingly prolific association with Robert Shaw. The duo went on to arrange, edit, and/or record over two-hundred choral works, among them American folk hymns, sea shanties, hymns, and spirituals. Not only was her association with the Robert Shaw Chorale professionally enriching, one of the baritones in the group, Tom Pyle, became her husband and the father of their five children. Their twenty-year marriage was loving and joyful but cut short by Tom’s fatal heart attack.
Despite her great loss, she went on to earn seven honorary doctorates. Tributes included the Harvard Glee Club Medal, the National Opera Association, “Sacred in Opera” Achievement Award, and the New England Public Media Lifetime Achievement Award. She was recognized by Chorus America, the American Guild of Organists (AGO), The American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), The Hymn Society, and Choral Arts New England. She appeared regularly at gatherings of AGO, ACDA, the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, and virtually all the other denominational music associations. She redefined prolific! She left the world four operas, fifteen books, and countless recordings and octavos of original and arranged works in addition to the material she produced with Robert Shaw. Her name appeared in numerous publishing catalogs. In 1985, she founded Melodious Accord, Inc. This not-for-profit served as an umbrella group for her many concerts and professional appearances.
The church brought music to Alice at a very young age and likewise Alice brought her God-given skills and love of music and singing to the church. What better place to develop and revel in her first love, communal song? She was a fervent advocate for the human voice in worship. She preferred a congregation of acapella singers to an orchestra, an organ, or a choir. She truly believed that the human voice was the preeminent instrument for worship and the responsibility to use it remained with all the gathered worshipers. In front of a congregation, she conducted, inspired, and most importantly animated worshipers to use their God-given voices as instruments of praise. Singers were led by her enthusiasm, her gestures, her eyes, and even her smile. I feel certain that she would never so much as think of leading singing worshippers with an amplified solo voice, which admittedly, this writer considers as an unfortunate practice too often applied in worship experiences today. For Alice, the worshiping assembly had a voice to give on its own and they were expected to give it without competing with a soloist at a microphone. She felt that the role of song leaders and cantors was to draw the singing out of the assembly for it was the assembly’s song to sing, not the leaders.
Alice Parker had a unique gift. She could nurture and form an assembly of singers with drones, humming, rounds, and an extensive use of dynamics. All these techniques she studiously applied based on the lyric, the text, and the poetry of the given hymn. She composed and arranged many sacred choral works for multiple voices and instruments, but when it came to the assembly, she preferred unison acapella singing brought to life with the above-mentioned musical elements rather than relying on only the more standard SATB form. Alice’s first musical love was clearly melody.
God gave the church Alice Parker for 98 years. She lived during a period of liturgical renewal when the church was struggling to develop congregational singing in the vernacular language, and during a time when an explosion of new hymn texts and tunes suddenly appeared on the scene. Within this unique period in history, she inspired pastoral musicians of all stripes, leaving us with one example after another of how to enable God’s people to sing! Along the way she left the world’s pastoral musicians with simple and sometimes stinging words of wisdom. While lecturing, she would often hold a piece of music to her ear and say with her typical dimpled smile, “I hear nothing! The music is not on the paper page, the music has to be lifted off the page by us. We have to bring it to life!” My personal favorite quote from Alice came during the COVID shutdown in the 2020s. As all public gatherings, including church services were discouraged and choral and communal singing was often forbidden due to the proximity of the singers and the rather heavy breathing singing requires, her comment on this sad situation was golden: “That’s OK, the birds are still singing!”
Tribute prepared by Michael A. Cymbala, © 2025, Michael A. Cymbala.
All rights reserved. Used with permission.