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    ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ Review: A Whole Life in Art

    The painter Apolonia Sokol is the ostensible subject of a wide-ranging documentary about life itself.“For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen the world through my camera,” a woman’s voice says in the early moments of “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Onscreen, we’re watching — presumably through that same camera — a young woman, strong features, entrancing smile, dark circles under her eyes, bearing the expression of a person who’s not afraid of the lens one bit. “But no motif,” the voice continues, “has caught my eye as she did.”The face belongs to Apolonia Sokol, but the voice belongs to Lea Glob, the filmmaker who followed Sokol off and on for 13 years. The pair first met in 2009, and Glob, who is Danish (and speaks mostly in Danish throughout the film), decided to make Sokol the subject of a film school assignment: to create a documentary portrait of a person. She was, she tells us, entranced by Sokol’s life. Raised in a theater in Paris, then in Denmark after her parents split up, having weathered a life-threatening disease as a teen, Sokol returned to Paris when she turned 18 with aspirations to “walk in the footsteps of the great painters.” By that time, the theater (which her father had run) was barely holding on, but Sokol created a world in it nonetheless. That world grabbed Glob and wouldn’t let go.The age-old documentarian’s question — who is really the subject of a nonfiction film? — constitutes a major theme that runs through “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Glob speaks of entering the “magical theater” in which Sokol “played the starring role,” but even as the artist ages, the theater closes and life shifts drastically, Glob stays along for the ride. “Whether I captured Apolonia with my camera or she captured me with her theater, I don’t know,” she says. Glob’s method is observation, without a particular end or point in mind, very nearly to a fault. She even admits, late in the film, that she couldn’t really figure out when to turn off the camera — a question that plagues many an observational documentarian, and most artists and writers, too. Every time Glob thought the film might be finished, Sokol’s life morphed again: a move to New York, to Los Angeles, stints working with artists and for businesspeople. Each time, Glob went back to film some more.This is not the kind of documentary intended to help you learn about the life of the painter Apolonia Sokol. Unless you’re deep in the art world, you may not even know who that is. Instead, it’s a movie about life and how it’s lived, with Sokol’s portraiture forming a pleasing harmony rather than a narrative backbone. The film moves roughly forward in time, but jumps backward and sideways sometimes, as if Glob — in making sense of the present — is remembering something she watched long ago. It’s easy to refashion any artist’s life as a narrative of inevitability, but Sokol paints with no guarantee that she’ll ever break into the mainstream art world. We watch her grueling uncertainty through the eyes of someone who also isn’t really sure what she’s making. The point here isn’t to document the rise of a star, but to observe the process of making.That fact alone sets “Apolonia, Apolonia” apart from the deluge of subject-approved documentaries that have flooded the market and film festivals in the past several years. Those movies are frequently hagiographic, though not inevitably so. The intended audience is the famous subject’s fans, or those who wish to be. Thus these films come with a built-in viewership, which brings along a healthy budget. They’re safe investments for funders and streamers, and the ecosystem is built for them. But they offer few surprises.In a movie like “Apolonia, Apolonia,” however, there’s no obvious path along which the story will unfold when filming begins, which makes it hard to pitch to the people who hold the purse strings. Instead, most of the director’s work comes in the editing stage, when the recurring threads in all that footage become more clear. The subject of this film is expulsion, and the way that Sokol’s story parallels that of women who have been cast from their homes because they refused to fit established molds, and must make new lives elsewhere. This theme is echoed in a more melancholy key in Sokol’s friend Oksana Shachko, a feminist activist whom Sokol took in when she became a refugee from her native Ukraine (and was “already an icon,” as Glob puts it). They live together for years, and describe themselves as a couple, as soul mates, though the nature of their intimacy is kept a bit coy in the film. What matters is their spiritual and creative connection, the support they give to each other in their pursuit of creativity and determination to avoid motherhood.Glob, on the other hand, gets pregnant and bears a child during the course of the filming — a fact that interests Sokol for how it represents a creative woman evolving her life. At the start of the film, the 20-something Sokol seems to be constantly performing for the camera, showing Glob the tapes her parents made of her own conception and birth. But as time wears on, the friendship between them, which slips on and off screen, grows into something more symbiotic. Mirrors appear: Sokol’s youthful illness is reflected in Glob’s life-threatening pregnancy complications. Sokol’s portraiture keeps shape-shifting as she matures as a painter, just as Glob’s portrait of Sokol keeps mutating.“Apolonia, Apolonia” is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet. Glob repeatedly refers to her filming and Sokol’s painting, their work of creating portraits, as cheating death — something they both do in their real lives, too. “The truth is, I never had that control,” Glob says. It took her more than 13 years to understand what she was looking at: “life itself, larger, tougher, and more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.”“Apolonia, I’m going to turn off the camera now,” she says, as we see the smiling face of an older, wiser Sokol, less interested in performance now than in a full life. And then the screen goes black.Apolonia, ApoloniaNot rated. In Danish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Book of Clarence’ Review: Messiahs Wherever You Look

    LaKeith Stanfield leads a predominantly Black cast in a retelling of the story of Jesus that’s both irreverent and devoted.The subject of a Jesus movie is technically Jesus. But every movie based on the biblical account of Jesus — and there are many such movies, stretching back to 1898 — says at least as much about the people who made it as it does about the man himself. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” paints a heavily Catholic, heavily bloody image of a suffering hero. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” draws a romantic, Rennaisance-derived portrait of a lush, otherworldly Christ. “The Jesus Film,” produced for evangelistic purposes, takes its text entirely from the biblical account, attempting to render a literalist version of a savior. William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” functions almost like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the story, with the main character crossing paths with Jesus only occasionally while experiencing a more broadly appealing revelation about radical forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. (And, yes, racing chariots.)“The Book of Clarence” is something entirely different than these and dozens of other renderings. But it bears some passing resemblance to another contemporary Jesus hit: “The Chosen,” a wildly popular television show that was crowdfunded and produced by Angel Studios (of last year’s megahit “Sound of Freedom”), and was so popular on streamers that the CW bought the rights to broadcast the first three seasons in 2023. (The fourth season will premiere exclusively in theaters this February.) Its popularity owes as much to a broad appetite for faith-inflected content as to its central concept: This is Jesus and those around him as you’ve never seen them before. They’re humans, with lives and dramas — not flat figures on a stained-glass window, or storybook characters, or ethereal saints. (It helps that the Jesus of “The Chosen,” unlike many other representations, actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.)As with that series, “The Book of Clarence” is a highly ambitious attempt at relatability, with an added reverence for the old-school “Ben-Hur”-era Hollywood biblical epics. Jeymes Samuel, who wrote and directed the film, clearly knows and loves the Bible story. He also doesn’t feel particularly beholden to a literalist rendering of the text. Here, Jesus and the apostles and their neighbors and friends are played by Black actors from around the diaspora, mostly in their own accents. The white actors play the Romans, a colonizing force of oppression.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Adan Canto, ‘The Cleaning Lady’ and ‘X-Men’ Actor, Dies at 42

    In a career spanning more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles, including a control-obsessed criminal, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Adan Canto, the Mexican actor known for his roles in TV series such as “The Cleaning Lady” and “Designated Survivor” as well as for playing Sunspot in the film “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” died on Monday. He was 42.His death was confirmed by his publicist, Jennifer Allen, who said the cause was appendiceal cancer. She did not say where he died.In an acting career that spanned more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles including a furious criminal hellbent on having control, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Mr. Canto said in a 2013 interview with Collider that he had “always been fascinated by people, their psychology, what drives them and trying to understand them.”Italia Ricci, left, and Adan Canto were both series regulars in the show “Designated Survivor.”Ben Mark Holzberg/ABCIn “The Cleaning Lady,” which premiered on Fox in 2022, Mr. Canto played the gangster Arman Morales, who recruits a woman, played by Elodie Yung, into his criminal organization after she witnesses a murder. The show is entering its third season this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Marisa Pavan, Oscar Nominee for ‘The Rose Tattoo,’ Dies at 91

    The twin sister of the Italian ingénue Pier Angeli, she attempted to avoid the pitfalls of fame that befell her sister’s career.The Italian actress Marisa Pavan never achieved the fame of her twin sister, Pier Angeli, a film ingénue of the 1950s who graced national magazine covers, and whose romance with James Dean and subsequent marriage to the singer Vic Damone became the stuff of Hollywood lore.Ms. Pavan — analytical, at times defiant and, in her view, less conventionally beautiful than her sister — nevertheless carved out a successful career herself. She appeared in a number of high-profile films throughout the 1950s, including “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress.And she did it her way, bristling at the star-making machine that she believed had turned her sister into a sexualized confection of the silver screen.“The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like, but from this moment on, it was not my sister I had in front of me anymore,” Ms. Pavan said in an interview with Margaux Soumoy, the author of a biography of Ms. Pavan, “Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!” (2021). “She had become a studios’ product.”Ms. Pavan, right, with her twin sister, the actress Pier Angeli, in 1952. “The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like,” Ms. Pavan said of her star-crossed sister.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan died on Dec. 6 at her home in Gassin, a village on the French Riviera, Ms. Soumoy said. She was 91.Maria Luisa Pierangeli, known as Marisa, and her fraternal twin, Anna Maria Pierangeli, were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, to Luigi Pierangeli, an architect, and Enrichetta (Romiti) Pierangeli, who later helped guide the careers of her daughters. (Their younger sister, Patrizia, born 15 years after they were, also became an actress.)The family moved to Rome when the twins were 3 and, during World War II, harbored a Jewish general in the Italian Army who was hiding from the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. His last name was Pavan, which Marisa, who had grown close to him, would eventually adopt as her screen name.Her sister’s career started in her teens, when she was discovered on a street in Rome. When Mr. Pierangeli died in 1950, the family relocated to the United States to further her career.Marisa had no interest in the limelight until a friend of the family, Albert R. Broccoli, an agent who would go on to produce the James Bond film franchise, invited her to visit the set of “What Price Glory” (1952), a film set during World War I starring James Cagney and directed by John Ford.Once she was there, the producer Sol Siegel asked her if she could sing in French. She could, and she did. “I sang a song of Jacqueline François,” Ms. Pavan said in a 2015 interview with Film Talk, an online film journal. She recalled Mr. Siegel responding, “You’re going to test tomorrow!”“I took all of this as a joke,” Ms. Pavan said. But she took the script home, learned the scene and returned the next day.She got the part — a French girl who falls in love with a U.S. Marine, played by Robert Wagner — and discovered a passion for acting.Her career reached its pinnacle three years later with “The Rose Tattoo,” based on a Tennessee Williams play. Ms. Pavan played Rosa, the rebellious daughter of a grief-stricken Sicilian widow (Anna Magnani) whose life in a town on the Gulf of Mexico takes a turn when she meets an ebullient trucker (Burt Lancaster).Ms. Pavan with Robert Wagner in “What Price Glory” (1952), her first film.Paramount Pictures, via AlamyHer sister, who by then went by the name Pier Angeli, had a long-term contract with MGM that limited her freedom to choose her roles and control her image, Ms. Soumoy wrote. But Ms. Pavan wished instead to preserve her independence and worked with various studios.“From the moment I realized that I wanted to build a career as an actress, I kept telling my agents to only find me quality parts that would fit my own personality and tastes,” Ms. Pavan was quoted as saying in Ms. Soumoy’s book. “The last thing I wanted was to be kept prisoner under contract to one studio like Anna was.”Her other notable roles included the noblewoman Catherine de Medici in “Diane” (1956), a romance set in the 16th century that starred Lana Turner; the wartime fling of Gregory Peck’s conflicted suburban husband and father in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956); and the love interest of Tony Curtis in the murder mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957).Ms. Pavan and the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1989. They married in 1956 and remained married until his death in 2001.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan married the French film and stage star Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1956. He died in 2001.Her sister’s life ultimately took a tragic turn as she encountered a faltering career, a series of unhappy relationships and struggles with mental and physical health. In 1971, Ms. Angeli was found dead at 39.Although speculation of suicide has swirled for years, Ms. Pavan remained adamant that her sister’s death was accidental, a reaction to a medication a doctor had given her during a bout of anxiety. It was a loss from which Ms. Pavan never fully recovered.“She felt like she had lost half of herself,” Ms. Soumoy said.Ms. Pavan is survived by her sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick Aumont; her sister Patrizia; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Her eventual parting with the movie business appeared to stem from one clash in particular. While filming the splashy historical romance “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the headstrong Ms. Pavan squared off against a producer after many of her scenes were cut, and threatened to leave the project. The move resulted in her effective blacklisting by studios, according to her biography.Ms. Pavan pivoted to television, making appearances on shows like the police procedural “Naked City,” the snappy private investigator drama “The Rockford Files” and the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” She acted into the early 1990s. Late in life, she expressed no regret over her fate in Hollywood.“It was not in my nature to compromise,” she told Film Talk. “They did change my sister; they made her up like a pinup girl. I could wear a wig to play a certain part, but they could not change me in life.” More

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    The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings Is on a New Journey: Flutes

    The British musician is an artist in residence at Winter Jazzfest in New York this week, playing an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.As Shabaka Hutchings led a concert tribute to Pharoah Sanders in early December, he returned to a familiar equation: funneling gallons of air through his tenor saxophone, transforming it into a corrosive stream of sound.Hutchings has been an essential figure on a British jazz scene that has experienced an uptick in popularity over the past decade because of its erasure of genre boundaries and its embrace of the art form’s foundational dance music sensibilities. His distinctive tenor has long been the through line of his diverse, widely acclaimed projects, connecting the electronic skronk of the Comet Is Coming to the fire of Sons of Kemet, and lately to the legacy of fellow hard-blowing saxophonists like Sanders.But by the time we met earlier this month, Hutchings, 39, had put down the saxophone, if not for good then certainly for the foreseeable. A handful of gigs across London last month — the Sanders tribute, an extended take on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and a final flourish as a guest with the pianist Alexander Hawkins’s trio — were the final chances to hear Hutchings performing on an instrument that has dominated his musical life for the first part of his professional career. When he appears at New York’s Winter Jazzfest as an artist in residence this week, for the most part he will be playing flutes, an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.“The bands that I was doing those gigs with became successful enough for them to dominate all the space of my work,” Hutchings said, speaking quietly and methodically, in a way that suggested recounting recent life events to others may be another extension of his artistic practice. “People say, because you’re doing lots of work on the saxophone, you are a saxophone player. I’m not really a saxophone player.” He felt that the only chance to be proficient elsewhere was to make a bold change.“I think of him as a sort of a multi-instrumentalist,” said the pianist Alexander Hawkins, a longtime collaborator. “Rather than being a switch, I think this is just a move towards other modes of expression.” The decision, which Hutchings said “ultimately boils down to intuition,” still surprised even him, though. “I literally would never have imagined putting down the saxophone back in 2020,” he said.In 2020, Hutchings also likely didn’t anticipate a rising profile for the flute in jazz. But “New Blue Sun,” a surprise release from the onetime Outkast rapper André 3000 last November that featured him playing different types of flute, gave the instrument a boost. (A new album from Hutchings is due this spring.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Norma Barzman, Blacklisted Screenwriter, Dies at 103

    After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in self-exile overseas.Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died on Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death.Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups.The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman told The Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we were a little silly, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there was a chance of making a better world.”Mrs. Barzman with her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, in Madrid in 1961. When the opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London in 1949, they expected to be there for six weeks. They ended up living abroad until 1976.via Barzman familyFor a time in the 1930s and ’40s, being a Communist, or just sympathetic to the cause, was considered de rigueur among the Hollywood left. But with the onset of the Cold War, attitudes began to shift. Rumors of a government crackdown percolated.The couple were sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman in a convertible stopped to talk. After a guarded introduction — her name was Norma, too — she told them that there was a police car at the bottom of the hill, stopping anyone turning onto the street to ask them about the Barzmans. Years later, they would realize that the other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.That fall, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a group of screenwriters, directors and producers to testify about their connections to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer questions, and each was later found in contempt. Though the Barzmans were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten, they feared they would be subpoenaed soon.A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives released the so-called Waldorf Statement, which declared that the 10 witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their relationship to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the industry.Work for the Barzmans quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, an opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London, where the blacklist didn’t reach. They set sail on the Queen Mary, expecting a six-week trip.They would not return to the United States until 1965, and they would live abroad until 1976.After several years in London, they moved to Paris; they eventually settled in Provence. They became local celebrities of a sort — the family that defied the blacklist — and made friends with the likes of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.An undated photo from the Cannes Film Festival. From left, Mr. Barzman, Mrs. Barzman and the Italian filmmaker Basilio Franchina.via Barzman familyMr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European productions, though often without credit. Mrs. Barzman got some work, too, but it was harder, especially since she also was raising seven children.Another friend, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek one day and called me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she said in an interview for the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film industry and the community around it had changed significantly, and they never managed to restart their careers.“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically, she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became known for his work in computational linguistics.They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland at the start of World War II.The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the progressive people I liked and who were politically active were Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”Norma Barzman with her father, Samuel Levor, in Nice, France, in about 1930.via Barzman familyShe met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, yet another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern movies were too complex for women to write. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.Mrs. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946: “Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman is survived by another daughter, Luli Barzman; five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).She also became outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the role many in the industry played in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who has written extensively about the blacklist, called her the era’s “keeper of the flame.”In 1999 she joined some 500 other people outside the Academy Awards ceremony, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan.To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified before the House committee, identifying several friends and colleagues in the industry as former Communists and earning long-lasting enmity from many in Hollywood.Mrs. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, carried a sign that read “Kazan Is a Fink.” More

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    What Did We Learn From a Year in Live Shows?

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicNo one on the New York Times pop music staff attends more live shows than Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor. On this week’s Popcast, she reflects on the first full post-pandemic year of live performances, with stadium and arena tours finally back at full strength.That includes reflections on performances by Madonna, the Rolling Stones, 100 gecs, Depeche Mode, SZA, the Cure, Liz Phair and many more.Guest:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Alice Parker, Composer Who Heard Music in Poetry, Dies at 98

    A master of American choral music, she wrote arrangements of hymns, folk songs and spirituals used in concert halls and churches countrywide.Alice Parker, whose arrangements of hymns, folk songs, and spirituals were used in concert halls and churches across America, and who composed 11 song cycles and four operas, died on Dec. 24 at her home in Hawley, Mass. She was 98.Her death was confirmed by two of her children, Molly Stejskal and David Pyle.Ms. Parker’s simple renderings of traditional hymns like “Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal,” spirituals like “You Can Tell the World,” and Christmas carols and folk songs, made her a trusted partner for choirs all over the country.For two decades she also worked with the most prominent American chorus of her day, the Robert Shaw Chorale, collaborating with Mr. Shaw on hundreds of works.Insightful settings of poems by Emily Dickinson and Archibald MacLeish gave her a footing in the world of the art song.And her use of texts by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for an oratorio written for the anniversary of his death, “Sermon From the Mountain,” and by Eudora Welty for an opera first performed with Ms. Welty sitting in the audience in Jackson, Miss., testified to Ms. Parker’s broad humanist sympathies.But it was her devotion to choral song over eight decades, and her conviction that communal singing was a deeply human activity, that gave her a distinctive place in American music. That devotion connected her to the earliest traditions of organized American music-making , the congregational singing in colonial churches that was served by the country’s first composers.Ms. Parker, far left, on the cover of a Dec. 29, 1947, issue of Newsweek, singing with Robert Shaw and others in the Collegiate Chorale.via Newsweek.Trained in music at Smith College and Juilliard, Ms. Parker rejected the mid-20th century’s modernist 12-tone orthodoxies in favor of an older, modal approach.The resulting simplicity in her choral settings, whether of her own compositions or of the tunes of others, made her music accessible to the broadest possible public.“She is a giant, was a giant in the field of choral music,” said E. Wayne Abercrombie, professor of music emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “She was incredibly focused on music at the ground level.”“She wasn’t about professional choirs,” he added. “She was focused on getting everybody singing. She would go into the church for an hour or two, and have people singing hymns.”For Ms. Parker singing served a deeper purpose than simply providing pleasure.“When we sing something perfectly lovely together, not necessarily the B minor Mass or something that needs a lot of rehearsal, but a hymn, or a folk song, or a children’s song, we sing it together, and it really clicks, and you have this marvelous feeling of brotherhood in the room,” she said in an interview with Newmusic USA in 2022.Her affinity for the civil rights movement was influenced by these beliefs, as was her partnership with the Southern humanism of Ms. Welty. Ms. Parker adapted Ms. Welty’s novella “The Ponder Heart” for an opera of the same name. She drew on Southern musical traditions — barbershop quartets, blues, gospel, scat singing — to produce “just the right tone” of heartfelt simplicity for Ms. Welty’s work, in the view of the New York Times critic Edward Rothstein, reviewing the work’s premiere in 1982.“If all this had been more sophisticated, less basic and more self-conscious, the beating of that innocent Ponder heart might have sounded unbelievable,” Mr. Rothstein wrote.Like her earlier operas, two of them based on religious themes, this one featured the basic orchestration and easy tunefulness that were hallmarks of her work.Ms. Parker came by her “simple” style having overcome, in a yearslong internal struggle, what the academy had tried to impose on her.Ms. Parker conducting a rehearsal. “I would hear the music in the poetry as I read the poetry,” she said.via Parker FamilyFor years, “I didn’t compose a single thing,” she said. “And when I finally started again, it was things for children’s choir, because then I didn’t have any responsibility toward writing the music of the future,” the modernist styles she rejected.“Once that dam broke inside of me, within three or four years, I was writing whole cantatas, whole suites of music, finding wonderful poetic texts that I wanted to set and could set,” she added. “I would hear the music in the poetry as I read the poetry.”Alice Stuart Parker Pyle was born on Dec. 16, 1925, in Boston, the daughter of Mary Shumate (Stuart) Parker, who founded a plastics laminate company, and Gordon Parker, a businessman who imported hardwood. She sang and played the piano from an early age, graduated from Smith College with majors in organ and composition in 1947, and went on to study choral conducting with Robert Shaw and Julius Herford at the Juilliard School, from which she graduated in 1949.Her subsequent association with Mr. Shaw resulted in numerous albums of folk song and hymn arrangements. “They are written so that amateur singers can sing them, but professionals can bring them to a different level,” said Mr. Abercrombie. “That’s a real gift.”Ms. Parker married a fellow singer in the Robert Shaw Chorale, the baritone Thomas Pyle, in 1954. He died in 1976.Ms. Parker is survived by her five children, Molly Stejskal, Katharine Bryda and David, Timothy and Elizabeth Pyle; a sister, Mary Stuart Parker Cosby; 11 grandchildren; and 6 great-grandchildren.Immediately after the assassination of Dr. King, in April 1968, she was commissioned by the Franconia Mennonite Chorus to write a work to commemorate him. “Central to an understanding of the man and his mission must be the realization that he took the Sermon on the Mount with complete, terrifying literalness,” she wrote in notes for the piece.In a 2020 documentary about her by the filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley, Ms. Parker recalled her gratitude at receiving the order from the Mennonites as a distraction from her own grief. “I can only write for a perceived need,” she told Mr. Montes-Bradley. “I can’t write for a concert.” In this case the need was partly her own.Ms. Parker conducting in a class in 2016. Chase Heilman/Starboard & PortIn 1984, Ms. Parker founded a choir, Melodious Accord, with whom she made over a dozen choral albums. In the following decade, she moved back permanently to the farm that had been her childhood summer home in Hawley, in the hills of western Massachusetts, having lived for many years in New York. She focused on teaching and on singing at her church.“What she was able to do was bring out the music in us,” recalled the Rev. Allen Comstock of Charlemont Federated Church in Hawley. He remembered the hundreds of people who came to her workshop. They sat with her for a week, he said, to listen and learn.Although she focused on the joy of singing, Ms. Parker was deeply affected by tragedy, especially the deaths of Dr. King and her husband. This despair surfaced in her later work, notably a dark song cycle to poems by Emily Dickinson, “Heavenly Hurt” (2016). Dickinson was an “obsession” for her, she told Mr. Montes-Bradley.She and Dickinson, Ms. Parker told the filmmaker, had been “shaped by something in the New England soil that seems to be concerned with big questions — life and death, and love and suffering, joy and sorrow.” More