How Many Miles to Paradise -
Interview with Mr. Peter Boyer

Peter Boyer, composer, conductor, and scholar, is a five-time winner of national music awards. He has written many musical themes for Hollywood movies and is a guest professor of music at Claremont Graduate University. For the concert, he wrote the music for the Supreme Master Ching Hai's poem "Love Melody IV." He also conducted the musical dramatic piece, "The Peace Seeker" during the concert. Music that he had composed for the short film "Walk the Way of Love," also was performed at the concert.

PB: This poem is organized in quadrangle, a group of four lines, so I organized my music in this sort of four-line group. For example, a recurring theme in the poem is the three-word line, "How many miles?" And this recurs several times. The first time is in the second quadrangle where the poem reads:

How many miles to the West's side;
How many miles to Paradise;
How many miles to your heart;
How many miles to mine?

So, I have actually taken those three words and made that sort of the theme of the song. That is a recurring motif, and I have that music entered at the beginning, returned in the middle, and returned at the end just sort of to round it out. In the final moments of the song, that actually appears purely musically without the words, and then the singer comes back in for a final time to close it out. The theme is of longing, of wishing to know how long it will be before one is reunited with one's loved one.

 

 

 

Copyright © The Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association
All Rights Reserved.