Alice Stuart Parker Pyle (December 16, 1925–December 24, 2023), known professionally as Alice Parker, was a composer, arranger, conductor, and teacher.
Parker studied composition and conducting at Smith College and the Juilliard School where she began her long association with Robert Shaw. The many Parker/Shaw settings of American folksongs, hymns and spirituals from that period formed an enduring repertoire for choruses all around the world.
In 1954, Parker married Thomas F. Pyle, a baritone soloist and member of the Robert Shaw Chorale, with whom she had two sons and three daughters.
Her list of published compositions had over five hundred titles, ranging from operas through song cycles, cantatas and choral suites to many individual anthems. She was commissioned by hundreds of community, school and church choruses, and her works appeared in the catalogs of a dozen publishing companies. Each year she toured the United States and Canada, leading performances and workshops on improvisation, rehearsal techniques and score study.
Parker served on the Board of Directors of Chorus America and was their first Director Laureate. She received the Distinguished Composer of the Year award from the American Guild of Organists in 2000, the 2014 Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association, the Harvard Glee Club Foundation Medal in 2015, six honorary doctorates, and the Smith College Medal, as well as many other awards. She was a Fellow of the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada, and was awarded grants from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the American Music Center. She was also honored by the International Emily Dickinson Society for her choral suite Heavenly Hurt.
In 2020 a documentary film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley was released, entitled Alice: At Home With Alice Parker. Produced by HFP in association with Melodious Accord, Inc., it focuses on Parker’s formative years and her collaboration on texts by Martin Luther King Jr., Archibald MacLeish, Eudora Welty and Emily Dickinson. It was selected for the 2020 Virginia Film Festival.
Parker passed away at her home at the age of 98.