Alice Tully

Talk story about Alice Tully, 85, who financed Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Tells how she recently celebrated her birthday. Her role in the arts is a unique one, because she combines the skills of a trained singer with the resources of a considerable fortune. (Her grandfather Amory Houghton was the founder of Corning Glass.) She sits on some 20 boards and councils involved with music, art, education, and medicine, and takes an active role in nearly all of them. She has subsidized young singers, helped to found the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and financed the hall that bears her name. Tells about various singers that have influenced her, and her professional singing career, both here and in Paris, which spanned 14 years. In 1958, after she had come into an inheritance, her cousin Arthur Houghton asked if she would be interested in helping to build a chamber-music hall in a new performing-arts complex on the upper West side, to be called Lincoln Center. Tells about her involvement in all the decisions in the Hall. It opened on Sept. 11, 1969, and received rave reviews. The following year, she went to Buffalo to accept an award for architectural excellence from the N.Y. State Council of the Arts.

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