The Parker Bailey Papers

The composer, pianist, and lawyer Parker Bailey was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 1, 1902. His early years were spent in Telluride, Colorado, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco.

In 1919 Bailey came to Yale to study composition with his uncle Horatio Parker, the Dean of the Yale School of Music, but Parker died that same year. Bailey studied instead with David Stanley Smith, receiving the B.A. in 1923. He continued his education at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with Quincy Porter and Roger Sessions.

In 1931 Bailey entered Cornell Law School, but during summer vacations he continued to devote himself to music. Friendships with organists led him to write frequently for the organ. He composed the Variations Symphoniques for organ for Arthur Quimby, who performed it at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1930. (It was not published until 1937.) Toccata-Ricercata-Finale for organ was written for Edward Arthur Kraft and first performed by him in 1933 in Cleveland. The H.W. Gray Company published it in 1958. Bailey's arrangement of his Toccata-Ricercata-Finale for two pianos was first performed in New Haven in 1935 or 1936 by Bruce and Rosalind Simonds.

After receiving the LL.B. degree from Cornell in 1934, Bailey found a job with the Joseph Robinson Truesdale Firm in New York. In 1937 he moved to the New York Law Revision Commission. Two years later, he joined the legal staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.

Bailey's growing legal responsibilities did not prevent him from remaining active in music. He later wrote, "The 2-piano texture has always interested me, and in Cleveland I occasionally operated one piano with Arthur Loesser at the other. When I started work in the General Counsel's office of the S.E.C. in Washington in the fall of 1939, I was for the first extended stretch in my career equipped not with one but with no piano." Despite the problems created by the absence of the "88-note device," Bailey composed nonetheless. "The evolving piece was a prelude and fugue on the chorale 'Wachet Auf,'" Bailey explained. "I thought of the fugue subject on a railroad coach rolling from Washington to Brooklyn late in 1939. By that time I had found out that my general overlord, Chester T. Lane, who was General Counsel of the S.E.C., was an avid reader of two-piano music. By the summer of 1940 Beryl Rubinstein and Arthur Loesser were practicing [the prelude and fugue] in Cleveland, and in October they included it in their Town Hall recital in New York."

Bailey remained with the SEC in Washington until 1942, at which time he returned to New York and began work with Davis, Polk, & Wardwell Attorneys. His association with this firm continued to his retirement in 1971. He died in 1982.