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Biography
Peter Merrick is a graduate in Organ Performance from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, where his teachers were William Wright and Douglas Bodle. While a student, he was Assistant Conductor of the renowned Hart House Chorus. He later studied choral conducting at the Westminster Choir College, Princeton, and was for five years the Artistic Director of the Jubilate Singers of Toronto.
He was appointed Director of Music at St. George’s United Church in 1993, and has held the same position at Eglinton St. George’s United Church since its foundation. He is also the Organist and Choirmaster of Upper Canada College, Canada’s leading independent school for boys; the UCC Singers, which he conducts, have toured several times, both in Europe and in Asia.
He has also twice toured England as organist for the choir of Havergal College, Toronto, playing in York Minster, Westminster Abbey, St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and in Worchester, Winchester, Durham, and Coventry Cathedrals. He served on the task groups that produced both the Psalter and the Hymnal of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and is a past President of the Toronto Centre of the Royal Canadian College of Organists.
He is currently interested in the relationship between the developing field of Somatics and musical education and performance. This has included work in the Alexander, Feldenkrais, and Trager Techniques. He is also a student of a century-old but still-radical approach to music education, the Dalcroze Method. He is completing the Certification requirements in Dalcroze through Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. As a church musician, his goal is a pastorally relevant music program that is both excellent and eclectic; at Eglinton St. George’s, classical church music is frequently combined with world music, Celtic music, jazz, spirituals, and gospel music.
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