THE COLLABORATIVE ARRANGEMENTS OF ALICE PARKER AND ...

titles in each album, as well as publisher information so that conductors may locate them.
Appendix II lists all Parker-Shaw arrangements and editions alphabetically, provides publisher
and other information, and indicates which titles are permanently out of print.
Warner Brothers acquired the Lawson-Gould catalogue in 2000, and Alfred Music
Publishing Company subsequently bought it in 2005. Alice Parker laments the fact that Warner
Brothers did a poor job of organizing the catalogue, and that Alfred has placed a significant
amount of it on “Permanently Out-of-Print” status. 5 The catalogue assembled here is a starting
point in the process of identifying and reissuing the repertoire as a whole.
The author was able to examine 136 of the 233 Shaw-Parker arrangements, thanks in part
to the kind gift of Alfred Music Publishers, and from Alice Parker herself. Though this may
appear a small percentage, one can see from Appendices I and II that a number of titles were
never published, and many are permanently out of print. Furthermore, a number of arrangements
whose copyrights are held by the Alfred Music Publishing Company are missing. The Parker-
Shaw copyrights that are held by Alfred should number 186, but on Alfred’s current list, only 94
are in print and 31 are out of print, a total of 125.
Traditionally this body of music has been known as the “Shaw-Parker” catalogue, due to
the more famous name of Robert Shaw. This research has brought to light, however, that the
arrangements were really primarily the work of Alice Parker, with Shaw serving principally as a
scrupulous editor. For this reason this paper will refer to them throughout as the “Parker-Shaw”
arrangements.
5 Parker, email communication with author, 16 Feb. 2010. “[Walter Gould] transferred the whole thing to Warner
when he retired—and they made a mess of it. They were supposed to keep everything up to date and immediately
available—and I didn’t even get any royalty payment for three years! They never knew what they had that wasn't in
print from LG at that point. I tried to get them to reprint one piece for a workshop, and they had no idea that it
existed—but they own the copyright, and won’t release anything. Maddening!”
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