Alice Tully; Philanthropist Funded N.Y. Concert Hall

Alice Tully, the onetime singer who personified the 19th-Century ideal of unrestricted philanthropy and gave New York the concert hall that bears her name, died Friday in her apartment overlooking Central Park. She was 91.

Miss Tully, who suffered a stroke two years ago, had become ill Monday with a fever, said her lawyer, James McGarry.

Heiress to a glass fortune, Miss Tully pursued a singing career in her youth, performing in Europe and the United States between the World Wars.

Later she provided, at first anonymously, most of the $4.5 million it took to build a chamber music recital hall in the new Lincoln Center. It was the first auditorium ever built in New York City especially for chamber music.

Drawing on her knowledge of concert houses as a performer and spectator, Miss Tully influenced the hall’s look and its amenities. She also helped form its resident company.

When Alice Tully Hall opened on Sept. 11, 1969, Miss Tully’s 67th birthday, critics rated the 1,096-seat auditorium among the best of its kind in the nation.

Miss Tully, born in Corning, N.Y., was a granddaughter of Amory Houghton Jr., who founded Corning Glass Works. Her father was a lawyer and two-term New York state senator; Katharine Hepburn was a second cousin.

After a private school education in New York City and Connecticut, Miss Tully decided she wanted to sing, and studied voice in New York, then Paris, where she made her professional debut in 1927.

She was a dramatic soprano who performed in recitals and occasionally in opera in Europe and the United States during the next 14 years. Songs of neglected French and German composers were considered her forte.

She also took a liking to airplanes and got a pilot’s license. For a time during World War II she flew for the Civil Air Patrol.

When the war ended, so did her professional singing.

She then used her time and money to remain active in fostering music and the other arts.

New York awarded her the Handel Medallion, the city’s highest cultural award, in 1970. In 1985 she was one of four patrons and seven artists to receive the first National Medal of Arts.

Miss Tully never married and has no immediate survivors.