Reflections on Alice Parker
Susan LaBarr, composer and Walton Music Senior Editor
December 2023

It was a cool October evening outside, but in the warm light of Alice Parker’s kitchen, my new friend Joe Gregorio and I were giggling in disbelief that we had been given permission to rifle through the drawers and cabinets to find what we needed to make dinner for Alice and the group of composers who had gathered for the week at her home in Hawley, Massachusetts. 

After all of these years, the contents of Alice’s kitchen still appear clearly in my mind: the saved bread ties of all colors neatly stored in a drawer, the washed and dried Ziplock bags ready to be used again, the small compost bucket under the sink filled with the scraps of nearby New England farms. I remember moments from that week that seem unrelated to music: driving Alice’s little red car down the road toward the town to pick up fresh corn right next to the field where it was grown, watching Alice sitting quietly at her kitchen table as the morning light beamed through the window ‘just so’, walking up the hill from the farmhouse with my new composer friends and sharing with them about my father’s cancer diagnosis—simple moments that stick out clearly in my mind.

During that life-changing week at Alice’s Composer’s Workshop, we learned that simplicity can often be the key to writing good and lasting choral music. As Alice was such a natural at living simply in her day-to-day life, it’s no wonder that she adopted this same ideal in her music making. I was newly graduated from my master’s program in music theory and beginning to receive commissions as a composer/arranger, and learning from Alice at this crucial point was absolutely essential to the successes that came after. Lessons from Alice in crafting melody, using counterpoint, and working as a woman in the choral music industry that week began to shape the musician and person I am today.
 

Melody
 

One of our assignments before coming to Alice’s composer’s workshop was to choose a few lines of text to bring to work with throughout the week. (I don’t remember what I brought with me, but I do remember that one of my colleagues brought the “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck” poem with him. Alice worked magic with that silly text.) As a group, we had to read our lines of text out loud to each other. Alice would accept nothing less than the highest level of expression and honesty from our readings, and she would coach us as we embarrassingly read the lines over and over. The point of the exercise was to experience the natural rhythms of the text—to feel which words were the most important and to begin to hear the natural meter that existed within them. 

Once our readings had met her hard-earned approval, Alice tasked us with notating the rhythms of our speech. She asked us to work within the natural meter of our chosen words (or a meter that could change from bar to bar) and write out in notation how we were speaking our texts. She was adamant that we didn’t manipulate the rhythms to make them “more interesting”. Then, as a group, we spoke our notated rhythms together, noticing where the group stumbled over a word and trying to figure out why the stumble occurred. Alice explained that if a choir continually stumbles over a passage in a song that there is a good chance that the words are set in a way that causes their natural rhythms to be skewed. Once these little stumbles were resolved, we were each left with an essentially perfectly notated passage of text. The next step was melody, Alice’s favorite.

Every time I begin to compose a new piece, I remember something that Alice told the group when we were taking our text passages to the next step. She told us, “Don’t try to force a melody onto your text, simply find the melody that is already there.” She asked us to try to stick to stepwise motion, only using leaps of any amount if it was absolutely dictated by the needs of the text. We were to sing the passages to ourselves and make sure that everything felt comfortable and right. 

Once we felt that our passages were in good shape, we shared them with the group, each of us reluctantly having a “solo moment” and being coached by Alice as we sang our lines. Having Alice Parker as a vocal coach was one of the most daunting experiences of my life. She doesn’t expect perfect singing (and she often admits that she never felt like a strong singer), but she does expect absolute full, honest, and heartfelt expression. And I don’t mean heartfelt acting. I mean true expression as if you are singing to a friend on their deathbed or to your newborn child. It was an intense experience, and my first glimpse into what makes Alice and her music so excellent. 

Alice is intentional in all things. Just as her bread ties and ziplock bags had their exact spots in her kitchen drawers, each note of an Alice Parker melody is placed with purpose. Her melodies are equal parts practical and divine. Each note is meant to be exactly what naturally wants to exist without adding anything more than what is needed. It is a heady thought, but I often compare Alice’s melody writing to the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quotation, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I believe that there is not a single note in an Alice Parker arrangement that isn’t purposefully there. She gave us a glimpse into that compositional practice by teaching us her detailed method of crafting melody that week, a method that I absolutely use to this day.
 

Counterpoint
 

My degree is in music theory, but somehow at my college I never had to take a class on counterpoint. It wasn’t required for my degree, and you better believe that I was never going to electively take something called “16th Century Counterpoint” or “18th Century Counterpoint.” Counterpoint was for Bach and for all of the weirdos who liked playing Bach pieces on the piano. I wiped that strange word from my mind, and I zoned out whenever anyone started talking about it around singer circles. Not for me.

However, it was the second or third day at Alice’s composer’s workshop that the word came up. Alice casually mentioned that she was almost finished writing a book on counterpoint (ew!) and that she wanted to give each of us a copy of the manuscript to work through with her. Her idea was that a composition teacher could use the book as a tool for teaching their students about the use of counterpoint. 

Alice starting reading from the book’s introduction and, for me, it was like watching a ray of sunlight break through a cloud. I’ll never forget her line in the book, “My conviction is that the proper answer to melody was more melody. Point/counterpoint.” She claimed that counterpoint was simply an answer to the melody; that crafting melody and counterpoint could be thought of as a conversation: one voice makes a statement, and the second voice responds to that statement. There is nothing mathematical or formulaic about how Alice crafts counterpoint, although that was the only way I had heard counterpoint described before my time with her. According to Alice, counterpoint is a natural conversation of voices, where there is overlap as if the second voice can’t wait to join in, there is repetition of sounds, words, notes, and there is use of the melodic content in the answering voice. Ultimately, she asked us to imagine singing around a campfire with a guitar and how voices join in when they just can’t wait any longer to be a part of the song.

This was a true lightbulb moment for me and a turning point in my compositional journey. I can look at my catalog of pieces and see a distinct line that runs between “before Alice” and “after Alice.” Incorporating counterpoint into my vocal writing became a game, a puzzle that could be put together. And, my goodness, it is so much more fun to sing! 

As a choral editor for Walton Music, I find myself always first glancing through the pages of a submission before I play through it to see what the black ink and the white space on the page looks like. From Alice’s training, it’s easy for me to tell if a piece is going to be interesting if I see a good amount of white space and if the black ink dances around the page in different patterns. I’ve learned to compose and to edit music through the lens of melodic structure, texture variance, and counterpoint use. The possibilities are endless that way!
 

Being a Woman in the Professional Music World
 

Alice taught me a lot about music and how to craft a song, but I am not sure that she knows how much she inspired me as a woman and mother. When I attended her composer’s workshop I was on the fence about having children. I had always assumed that children would be a part of my life, but then when the reality of life hit and my career and life felt so good as they were, it seemed like a crazy choice to make. 

Because her family is such an integral part of who Alice is, she brought up anecdotes from her family life in many of her conversations about music. She told us about raising five(!) children in Manhattan(!!) while her husband was away on tour with the Robert Shaw Chorale, all the while composing every day during nap time or between trips to the museum or the park. I know it can’t have been, but she made it sound effortless, and she made it clear that her family was of the utmost importance in her life, well beyond any of her professional accomplishments.

Her success as a composer and teacher while raising her children and hearing the practical ways that she made it all happen showed me that I could continue my career and have a child, and my husband and I welcomed Elliott a few years later in the midst of rehearsals for our choir in Tennessee. (I bowed out of singing, but Cameron still conducted that week!) I wonder where Alice found her confidence to move so naturally through motherhood and through her career as a composer. Who was her good example? I’m thankful that she was mine.

Alice has always seemed to hold herself with a dignified assurance of self. She quietly moves through our industry with humility and grace, but she can easily hold the attention of a room of thousands. She exists in a state of confident ability and never shouts with ego from the rooftops. I could never describe her as loud, brash, or out-of-touch; only as calm, strong, and always two steps ahead. She shows generations of women behind her the best way to be.

Again, in the introduction of her book on counterpoint (The Answering Voice), Alice speaks of music in this way: “Any notes on any page are like the leaves on a tree because they can live only when connected to twig, branch, bough, trunk and roots.” I like to think of myself as one of the leaves on the Tree of Alice—I am the composer I am today because of my connection to Alice. I know thousands of leaves who would say the same.

Susan LaBarr (b. 1981) is a composer and choral editor whose compositions are published by Walton Music, Morningstar Music, and Santa Barbara Music Publishing. Susan has completed commissions for choirs worldwide, most notably Seraphic Fire, New York Polyphony, the American Choral Directors Association, and the Texas Choral Directors Association. She served as the Missouri Composer Laureate for 2012 and 2013. Her arrangement of Quem pastores laudavere appeared on New York Polyphony’s 2014 Grammy-nominated album, Sing Thee Nowell. Her work for mezzo soprano and piano, Little Black Book, was premiered at Carnegie Hall in October 2019. Susan, her husband Cameron, and their son Elliott reside in Springfield, Missouri, where Cameron is the Director of Choral Studies at Missouri State University and Susan works as Editor of Walton Music.