Part of Alice Parker Tribute Weekend, October 13-16, including:

Friday, October 14
6pm | 74 Trinity Place, 2nd Fl.
Gala Dinner (Ticketed Event)

8pm | Trinity Church
Songs for Eve (Ticketed Event)
music by Alice Parker (b. 1925)
text by Archibald MacLiesh (1892-1982)

Sunday, October 16
2pm | St. Paul’s Chapel
Hymn Sing (FREE) with The Melodious Accord Hymnal

Composer, conductor, and teacher, Alice Parker was born in Boston, MA, in 1925. She began composing early, and wrote her first orchestral score while still in high school. She graduated from Smith College with a major in music performance and composition, then received her master’s degree from the Juilliard School where she studied choral conducting with Robert Shaw.

Her life’s work has been in vocal music, combining composing, conducting, and teaching in a creative balance. Her arrangements with Robert Shaw of folk songs, hymns, and spirituals form an enduring repertoire for choruses all around the world. She continues composing in many forms, from operas to cantatas, sacred anthems to secular dances, song cycles to string quartets. She has been commissioned by such groups as the Vancouver Chamber Chorus, the Atlanta Symphony Chorus, and Chanticleer. Her many conducting and teaching engagements keep her traveling around the United States and Canada.

Songs for Eve, an hour-long song cycle for vocal and string quartets, sets to music poems by Archibald MacLeish, the Pulitzer Prize-winning neighbor of Dr. Parker. MacLeish wrote of his text: “The story is the story of the beginning of Genesis—the greatest myth of all the myths—or, more precisely, what has become, in the last few generations, the greatest of all the myths. . . for it offered a means of examining the heart of our humanity, our consciousness of ourselves. . . Its principal speaker is, of course, Eve. Adam’s words are few but poignant as befits his situation. There are other occasional speakers as the babe, the serpent, the lion, the vine, and the thrush. And there are two trees as in Genesis: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . and the tree of life [but with a difference] because the events of the New Testament have intervened.”

The music features marches, lullabies, a love-song waltz, a two-part invention, recitatives, arias, and chorales. This work is supremely lyrical, sometimes dancing, sometimes weeping, always playing not only with the words, but with the ideas they represent.

More information at: www.melodiousaccord.org

PROGRAM

Preview of Songs for Eve with Alice Parker and Julian Wachner, Director of Music and the Arts at Trinity Wall Street