Alice Wildermuth O’Sullivan YouTube channel features music of church/classical/jazz musician

A YouTube channel, “Alice Wildermuth O’Sullivan,” features audio and video recordings of a gifted church/classical/jazz pianist/organist/choir director who died in 2020. January 14, 2021 would have been her 80th birthday.

Her debut as a church organist was Christmas Eve, 1945, three weeks before her fifth birthday. She was to provide musical leadership in Lutheran churches for over seventy years.

The channel includes:


  • Extraordinary jazz-enhanced African-American spirituals and gospel music, featuring a Night Job Trio (featuring a school administrator, MD and attorney), stunning clarinet improvisations, multiple percussionists and Oakland’s Bethlehem Lutheran Choir, circa 1990.
  • CD’s of her own arrangements of Christmas carols, featuring piano and bell instruments, as well as a holiday collaboration with San Francisco Opera Chorus soprano Amy McKenzie.
  • Recordings of her twenty years as keyboardist with the Elby Coy Orchestra, an eighteen piece jazz big band.
  • Her Carnegie Hall piano recital, 1989, and a classical organ concert.
  • Recordings of piano concerts and private recitals by someone who studied through her teenage years with European concert artist Egon Petri, whose other students included Earl Wild, John Ogden and Victor Borge.
  • Examples of a technique she developed playing the piano with one hand and bell and percussive instruments with the other.

The channel has been a project to share Alice’s music by her husband of over 51 years, Robert O’Sullivan, who continues to post materials to provide public access to the beautiful music of remarkably gifted artists.

The channel can be accessed here.

Her obituary can be found here.

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Contact

Robert O’Sullivan
[email protected]
(510) 872-1124

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Religion News Service or Religion News Foundation.

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