The May 2024 issue of Choral Journal is online and features a section remembering Alice Parker. Alice Parker led an incredible life dedicated to the timeless power of music. She passed away in 2023 at the age of ninety-eight. You can read her In Memoriam in this section. Following that is a selection of reprints from the Choral Journal that were either written by Alice Parker or include her voice. This section also includes two tributes from people who worked with and knew Alice. There are, of course, numerous others who can speak to the profound impact she had on the world of choral music and beyond. Here is a portion from her article reprint “Music in the Lives of People” from Choral Journal March 1998.
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We are born into this world with five senses, which are our avenues to the outside world. We learn through these senses the sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste of things around us, and through them we communicate with others of our species. Our society places a high value on the more rational functions of the brain, but we are designed to have first a sensory education. Those of us lucky enough to spend our lives in any of the arts know that a lifetime is not nearly long enough to explore the riches therein.
Each of the arts is an extension, a flowering, of one or more of the senses. Sound touches us early and late in our lives, reaching our central nervous system before being processed by the brain, awakening memories, responses, instant affinities, stirring up physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual reactions almost beyond our conscious control. In a small child, hearing and moving and joining in are inextricably bound together. Surely our first emotional ties are formed through the sound of loved voices, and the delight with which a baby responds to musical sounds is the beginning of musical education.
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Read the full section in the May 2024 issue of Choral Journal. acda.org/choraljournal
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