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Alice A. Andrews

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American composer and director (1866-1946)
Alice A. Andrews
The face of a white woman with curly hair, wearing a beaded jacket.Alice A. Andrews
Born1866
Minnesota
Died1946
California
NationalityAmerican
Other namesAlice Andrews Parker (after marriage)
Occupation(s)pianist, composer, musical director, vocal coach
Known forAndrews Family Opera Company

Alice A. Andrews (1866 – 1946), later Alice A. Parker, was an American pianist, composer and musical director of the Andrews Family Opera. Later in life, she was a vocal coach and instructor in New York City.

Early life

Andrews was born in St. Peter, Minnesota, the youngest of ten children of John Redding Andrews and Delilah Armstrong Andrews. Her father was a Methodist minister. She began performing with her family ensemble as a child, singing hymns in churches. She learned to play the family's melodeon from her older sister, Laura Andrews Rhodes.

Career

Andrews was a member of her family's troupe, the Andrews Family Opera Company, organized by her older brother Charles Andrews in the 1870s. Alice Andrews played piano and directed the music. The troupe initially offered various entertainments in small towns, from operettas to a handbell choir and a cornet band. In the 1880s, they traded their bandwagon for a Pullman car, and began mounting English-language opera productions, complete with sets and costumes, mainly in the American midwest, though occasionally farther afield, in Texas, Pennsylvania, or Manitoba.

Willa Cather recalled seeing Andrews perform in Nebraska in 1888: "There was the Andrews Opera Company, for example; they usually had a good voice or two among them, a small orchestra and a painstaking conductor, who was also the pianist. What good luck for a country child to hear those tuneful old operas sung by people who were doing their best: The Bohemian Girl, The Chimes of Normandy, Martha, The Mikado."

Andrews also composed and transposed works for the company. "She has a remarkable talent for transposition," commented one contemporary account, "and could transpose music as soon as she could read it." In 1913 she was based in New York, coaching opera singers and teaching, when she traveled to a reunion of the surviving members of the Andrews Opera Company, in Mankato, Minnesota. She was still living in New York as a voice coach in 1929, and in 1945, a year before her death.

The Andrews family was fictionalized as the Angel family in the novel "The Black Angels" (1926) by Maud Hart Lovelace as well as the Wakefield family in a novel, Singing Wheels (1979), by descendant Cornelia Andrews DuBois.

Personal life

In 1892 Andrews married the comedian and theatre manager, Charles A. "Chad" Parker, who performed with the Andrews Company. She died in 1946, in southern California. The Andrews Opera Company Papers are in the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society and at Minnesota State University at Mankato.

References

  1. ^ Willard, Frances Elizabeth; Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice (1893). A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life. Moulton. p. 26. ISBN 9780722217139.
  2. ^ Sweet, Charles. "The Andrews Family" The Table Rock Sentinel (December 1986): 11-21.
  3. DuBois, Cornelia Andrews. "Operatic Pioneers: The story of the Andrews Family" Minnesota History (Winter 1953): 318-325.
  4. "From Our Collection: Andrews Opera Co". The National Willa Cather Center. August 2014. Retrieved 2019-07-15.
  5. "Members of Old Andrews Opera Company Hold Reunion: Mankato Brother and Sister Entertain Singing Kinsmen". Star Tribune. August 10, 1913. p. 37. Retrieved July 15, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. Riley, Dorothy (March 25, 1945). "Give Them Grand Opera in English, Advises Prima Donna Who Tried It". Star Tribune. p. 31. Retrieved July 15, 2019 – via Newspapers.com.
  7. Jasmine, Taylor (2015-10-14). "The Black Angels (1926) by Maud Hart Lovelace". Literary Ladies Guide. Retrieved 2024-10-27.
  8. "The Black Angels". Julie Schrader. Retrieved 2024-10-27.
  9. DuBois, Cornelia Andrews (1979). Singing Wheels. Vanilla Press. ISBN 9780917266225.
  10. Andrews Opera Company papers (M470), Minnesota Historical Society.
  11. "Andrews Family Opera Company Papers, 1849-1977". Southern Minnesota Historical Center, Physical Collections, Library Services, Minnesota State University, Mankato. Retrieved 2019-07-15.
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