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ALICE PARKER

AT HOME WITH ALICE PARKER

Alice Parker

Alice: At Home with Alice Parker is a documentary film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley that explores the life and work of a renowned American composer and conductor. The film captures Alice Parker's reflections on her musical journey, her collaborations with Robert Shaw, and the creative process behind some of her most acclaimed compositions. The film is set in Hawley, a rural village in western Massachusetts, where Alice Parker lives and works at the age of ninety-five. The film celebrates Alice Parker's passion for music and her contribution to the choral tradition through intimate conversations and musical performances.

 

Alice Parker (b. 1925) is a distinguished composer, conductor, and choral music teacher. In a career that spans some seventy years, Alice found early prominence as protégé of conductor Robert Shaw, with whom she collaborated as a researcher and arranger of folk songs, hymns, and spirituals for the Robert Shaw Chorale. Alice’s compositional reach is extensive and inclusive, from children’s songs and church hymns to operas and significant concert works. In Alice: At Home with Alice Parker, the composer collaborates with Eduardo Montes-Bradley in an intimate portrayal of her life that illuminates her artistic achievements and her extraordinary kindness and passion for life.​ Renowned within the choral music community, Alice Parker is a modern pioneer in expanding the audience for choral music in all its “high” and “low” forms. This achievement was especially significant before the now-ubiquitous recording and distribution technologies. Among her contemporaries, Alice Parker is distinctive for her convictions about the fundamental value of singing for every individual and the capacity of choral singing to create social bonds that touch on the spiritual and afford intimations of the divine.​

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