The Website of Peter Link

A woman sitting next to me on the subway got up and left her New York Post on her seat. I thought to myself, “Hmmm, what’s that?” Then I remembered. It was one of them newspaper thingies from the past.

I picked it up and began to pour through the bad news.

This new song, with lyrics from the prose text of Mary Baker Eddy and the Bible, and music by yours truly, will debut to the world Easter Morning broadcast via the Internet from Boston’s First Church of Christ, Scientist. Sung by their soloist, Julia Wade, and played on its huge and wondrous 4 manual pipe organ by Bryan Ashley, it will also be released on Julia’s new CD, Solos, in early May of 2012. The CD version will accompany Julia with pipe organ and full orchestra.

Cabaret in New York City is alive and well and certainly diverse as ever. Long a hotbed for developing talent, the cabarets in Manhattan celebrated yet another year of diverse creativity with their 26th Annul MAC Awards (Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs) presentation held at BB King’s Blues Club.

This coming week we’re releasing a new 3 song CD performed by Julia Wade and written by yours truly entitled Affirmations. It was never supposed to happen like this, but sometimes we just don’t run our lives – our lives, instead, run us.

Then again, maybe God has something to do with it…

Just last year, on St. Patrick’s Day morning, I left the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater where I had just taught a class in Auditioning For The Theater, and, walking west for several blocks on my way to the subway, I was struck by the saddest of sights.

Here I was, in Midtown, Manhattan, on its elegant East Side at 11:00 in the morning on a weekday and I was picking my way through the masses of people staggering the streets, all dressed in their Irish greens and already deep into their celebration of this hallowed day and 90% of them already falling down drunk.

A dear friend, Bernie Kirsh, who happens to have been Jazz great pianist Chick Corea’s chief engineer, for the past thirty-some years sent me this picture the other day. I’ve been staring at it ever since receiving it and flashing back. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words – this one, perhaps 10, 000. Bernie probably took this picture of four guys standing in front of a mirror one day back in 1977 watching a dance rehearsal of the musical King Of Hearts as it prepared for its first out-of-town opening at the Westport County Playhouse in Connecticut on its way to Broadway.

As I begin this 5th installment post Julia and I have now completed two of the recordings, “One” and “Love” and today will record a third, entitled “Dominion.” This project now moves from my hands to Julia’s most capable throat, so to speak. I thought it might be interesting to do this Part 5 as an interview with our chanteuse.

Writing from prose that offers me no possibility to change words, edit words, or move words around in a sentence, made good scanning an absolute impossibility. This was a disappointment to the composer side of me because it meant that the use of the most powerful tool in music, repetition, would have to be forsaken. Would this also mean that I would be forced by the prose to write songs where we would never hear the same melody twice in the performance of the song?