Alice as a Young Composer, courtesy of the Pyle Family
I have written before about my late neighbor, the composer Alice Parker. In early September, Mohawk Trail Concerts (MTC) celebrated Alice with an afternoon of songs she wrote and songs she loved—plus a song written in her honor. I was lucky enough to be among the performers that day.
In fact, I came up with the idea for the concert. I’m sure someone else at MTC would have thought of doing it, but I was the one who first suggested it.
When Alice died in December, I was (not unnaturally) sad. I felt for her family members, who have always been honorary relatives. And I felt for our neighborhood, which had lost one of its pillars.
I decided to do something constructive with my grief instead of just wallowing in it. First, I wrote a memorial article and radio commentary about Alice.
Then I started planning the concert.
The music began with a few hymns arranged by Alice, who was probably best known for her choral singing. The impromptu quartet of singers included Alice’s daughter Molly.
All concert photos are courtesy of Kurt Wessbach.
Molly went on to sing a couple of selections from Alice’s setting of “Songs for Eve” by another local luminary, Archibald MacLeish. (MacLeish read the poems aloud at the music’s initial performance.) She was accompanied by the Farm House Quartet, a group of musicians from our area (including MTC board members) who were dear to Alice.
Two members of the quartet who adored Alice, Maggie Speier and Roy Lewis, played Alice’s arrangement of the Gershwin song “Love Walked In.”
Their son, Jasper Lewis, played and sang a song he had written after Alice’s death about her influence on his music.
Then I took the stage (you knew I had to) with some lighter numbers, including Alice’s composition “Find Me a Man I Can Cook For,” which she gave to me to perform over a decade ago. It’s a comic song, and audiences always enjoy it.
After various people, including Alice’s son David, got up to share memories of Alice, we ended with a sing along. Her family and former students joined me for the final song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
And then we drank a toast to Alice and nibbled on contributions from the MTC board and their spouses.
My favorite nibble of the day was the layered-hummus dish prepared by Daphne Bye, a pianist who is married to MTC’s executive artistic director, Mark Fraser.
Daphne has an extensive garden, and that garden was featured in the hummus, which was lovely to look at and lovely to eat. She served it with corn tortilla chips, but if one is grain free like Daphne one can use vegetable sticks to pick up the dip.
Daphne chops the vegetables for the hummus very finely. She even quarters her cherry tomatoes, which can’t be easy to do. The result is that each bite of hummus brings with it several different vegetable flavors, embodying the produce of late summer and early fall.
She said that she has seen similar dishes that add a layer of sour cream and/or guacamole to the hummus. Although I’m a fan of both, I agreed with her that that those might muddy the flavors of the dish.
Daphne’s Layered Hummus
All the ingredients here are more or less to taste, and one could easily double or even triple the recipe. Daphne tends to end up with 1 to 2 cups of chopped vegetables of varying colors. She suggests adding, or substituting, other vegetables according to preference.
Ingredients:
8 to 16 ounces of hummus
finely diced red bell pepper
finely diced black olives
finely diced red onion
finely diced scallions
finely diced cucumbers
quartered cherry tomatoes
chopped herbs: basil, parsley, or cilantro (I think she used basil when she served this to me.)
a generous drizzle of olive oil
Instructions:
Spread the hummus on a small platter. Top it with the vegetables and the chopped herbs. Drizzle olive oil over all. Serve with tortilla chips, gluten-free crackers, or sliced vegetables. Serves 4 to 8 as an appetizer.
Daphne snips basil.
