Alec Wyton, 85, Organist Who Updated Church Music, Is Dead

Alec Wyton, an English-born organist, composer and teacher who brought contemporary influence to American church music over decades, two of them as organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, died on Sunday in Danbury, Conn. He was 85.

His death was announced by his son Richard.

Besides presiding over prominent church music programs, he was the coordinator of the commission that produced The Hymnal 1982, the one used in Episcopal churches nationwide today.

Mr. Wyton (pronounced WYE-ton) grew up in London and Northampton, where an aunt, who raised him after his parents separated, encouraged him to learn to play piano and later organ. He joined the Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II but was discharged early because of a duodenal ulcer. He then enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music and, in 1943, at Oxford, where he studied music and history.

He came to the United States in 1950 at the invitation of the Episcopal bishop of Dallas, who wanted an English-style choir there. Later he went to St. Louis, where he married his first wife, Mary Couper Wyton; the marriage ended in divorce.

In addition to his son Richard, he is survived by his wife Mary Broman Wyton; three other sons, Vaughan, Patrick and Christopher; and three grandsons.

Bishop Horace Donegan of New York, a fellow Englishman, asked him to come to St. John the Divine in 1954 to be organist and master of the choristers. Mr. Wyton held that position until 1974, presiding over the 8,000-pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ and bringing in musicians from Duke Ellington and Ned Rorem to Leopold Stokowski and the cast of the musical “Hair” to resonate through the Gothic nave.

He left to become organist and choirmaster of St. James’s Church on Madison Avenue, where he stayed until 1987. He was later minister of music at St. Stephen’s Church in Ridgefield, Conn., where he moved, and then retired in 1996.

Mr. Wyton also taught at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan and, in the 1980s, at Manhattan School of Music, and he was president of the American Guild of Organists from 1964 to 1969.