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Highs and Low Choir

No matter what life throws at this supportive group, members are committed to keep on singing

July 3, 2025

When life’s circumstances go low, they set their spirits high — through song. The Highs and Lows Choir tackles anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges by collectively belting out some tunes. Music, members find, is medicine.

Highs and Lows Choir conductor Earle Peach says when the group comes together to sing, they evoke a feeling that he can best explain as “collective effervescence.”

The term coined by 20th century sociologist Émile Durkheim describes a phenomenon where members of a group share and communicate a unified thought or experience, and in the process, transcend their own individuality. And for Durkeim, tap into something almost God-like.

“You feel like the whole crowd is lifting you out of yourself,” says Peach. “There’s hardly a more profound human experience.”

Plus it’s a lot of fun.

The Highs and Lows Choir is a peer-run, low-barrier singing group for people with lived experiences of mental health challenges, along with their friends and supporters. Peach has been at the helm of the group leading their regular practices and performances around the city for more than 20 years.

“The choir itself was started [in 1993] by a social worker named Helga Hicks who was beginning to experience the effects of Alzheimer’s,” he says. “When she realized that she would be incapacitated by it, she took a bunch of her savings and dedicated it to the creation of a choir for people who had mental health concerns.”

Numerous studies have shown the beneficial links between music and increased cognitive function (particularly in individuals over age 50), decreased anxiety and even increased happiness.

Research also supports that engaging in music-making activities, such as group singing, can help with emotional release, promote self-reflection and create a sense of community.

Peach says the group has a fairly consistent core membership of about 12 people, with some people finding them through referrals from the MPA [Motivation, Power and Achievement] Society, the Kettle Society, Friendship Society and the West Coast Mental Health Network.

Alaric Posey, now the choir’s conductor, joined the group as a regular member in 2003 when a mental health counsellor told him about the work that Peach and the group were doing.

“I had a bachelor degree in music at the time. I was really depressed and I’d been thinking about auditioning for one choir or another,” Posey explains. “But when auditions take place, there are usually certain [times] when people are invited to audition, and I couldn’t get around to preparing anything. It took me a little while to even phone Earle and come to the choir.”

When Posey did get in touch with Peach and attended that first practice, he says he was immediately struck by how interesting the choir’s repertoire was.

“It was really quite marvellous. It was a repertoire that I hadn’t met yet… he had me singing this really rhythmically interesting bit of melody. Not just your garden variety rounds.”

Posey remembers one song in particular called the Carrion Crow, based on an old British folk story about a tailor who sees a crow in his yard and decides to try to kill it with a bow and arrow. But when the tailor takes aim at the crow, he misses and instead fatally wounds his prized sow.

“It’s politically salient and a rather sad story,” says Posey. “It’s like when we do things like decide to burn a lot of oil, often we’re solving a very trivial really important. It’s a story that we see play out over and over again.”

To this day, the choir’s repertoire remains unique and versatile. At their weekly practices at the Unitarian Church on West 49 Avenue and Oak Street, the group rarely sings a song in the same language twice in a row. Many of the songs have a powerful message, whether environmental, like Hermosa Pachamama or Signore Delle Cime, or with strong human rights undertones, like Bread and Roses, a song written by prominent activists Mimi and Richard Fariña. Several of the songs are original compositions by Peach himself.

“I have a bias towards folk music of various kinds. I try to avoid religious music and musicals.

Not to say it’s completely devoid of some kind of spiritual theme, but I try to stay independent of any mythology,” adds Peach. independent of any mythology,” adds Peach.

In the summer months, the group hosts performances at Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), where the choir encourages attendees to sing along.

“We put together a collection of maybe 20 of the best known songs and print them into a little booklet and hand those out to people,” says Peach. “They just call out the songs that they want to sing. I would say the most requested tune is definitely [Take Me Home], Country Roads.

Posey says that connecting with the community is really at the heart of what the Highs and Lows Choir does.

“We try really hard to serve the community. We sing at care homes and mental health facilities — anywhere we can bring some joy to people, especially people who may not have easy access to the kind of music that we’re singing. That’s something I really like about the choir, is the sense of purpose.”

The choir’s connection to the DTES doesn’t end with Oppenheimer. For years, Peach worked at the Carnegie Community Centre, where the group still performs once a year, running music programs before joining the Highs and Lows Choir.

When the choir unexpectedly lost a large source of its funding in 2013, Peach recruited another prominent DTES resident and community activist, Penny Goldsmith, to help out.

“I ran an anti-poverty group called PovNet for 18 years and [Earle] knew that I was fairly skilled in fundraising and grant applications and things like that,” says Goldsmith.

After a while spent working behind the scenes to help fundraise, apply for grants and get the choir charitable status in 2016, at Peach’s urging Goldsmith eventually also joined in singing with the choir.

“Singing is a really important part of organizing and political action. It’s a huge part of how to get people together. When I’m singing, I feel like I’m helping myself and helping other people. Without [art and music], we’re dead.”

Goldsmith serves as the chair of the choir’s board, but she says that keeping the choir going year after year is really a team effort, with Posey in particular pulling a lot of weight in the fundraising department.

Although Posey says that he finds managing grant applications and funding quite stressful, he says he has been touched by how much everyone has come together to keep the choir going.

“We organized a fundraiser, and not just the choir, but people in the community came together and organized a silent auction and [other creative fundraising activities],” he says. “What really stays in my memory is not so much how much money we raised, but just the festivities and coming together to help raise money for the choir.”

Despite facing some funding hurdles over the years, the choir is committed to remaining an open space with no fees or dues for its members and is always open to welcoming newcomers — particularly younger members or tenors, which Posey says are currently a bit underrepresented in the choir.

The group is currently planning a fundraising event at 411 Seniors Centre Society on Fraser Street in the afternoon of Sept. 13. More details will be released on their website: highsandlowschoir.ca

Posey adds: “I do feel like all of the members of the choir are friends and it’s just such a comfortable singing environment. It’s just musically — and socially —very rewarding.”

Raise your voice!

The Highs and Lows Choir holds monthly sing-alongs at Oppenheimer Park on Tuesdays throughout the year, from April to September. Summer sing-alongs will take place at 12 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month:

• Tuesday, July 8

• Tuesday, Aug. 5

• Tuesday, Sept. 2

The group meets in front of the Field House in the park and sing from 12 noon to 1 p.m. All are welcome. More information at highsandlowschoir.ca