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Local choir brings musical therapy to Orangeville

August 15, 2024   ·   2 Comments

By Joshua Drakes

The Singing For Health Initiative held a public performance on Aug. 10 at the Tweedsmuir Memorial Presbyterian Church in Orangeville.

The Choir performed 10 songs, which included September by Earth, Wind and Fire, Stand by Me by Ben E. King, Dancing Queen by ABBA, Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles, and more. The repertoire included a variety of styles and genres.

Julia Beth Kowaleski, owner of Julia’s Place Music Therapy Center, the organization that put together the choir, spoke before the performance, highlighting the collaborative nature of the event.

“It’s a really collaborative program,” she said. “The whole point of this program is to use music and the intergenerational design of the choir to help with socialization and reduce social isolation in our community. We use music because we know that it’s good for the brain and it’s good for the body.”

The Singing For Health initiative is an intergenerational choir group that set out on a 10-week mission to reduce the social isolation of older adults and those with disabilities through music. The group was open to anyone who loved singing and expressing themselves. The group also welcomed people with disabilities and provided a space where families could have positive experiences regardless of age or condition.

The initiative was run through Julia’s Place, a neurologic music therapy center based in Brampton, Ont. They use music as a form of therapy to help people of all ages. The Singing for Health Initiative specifically operated for seniors.

Kowaleski said she was inspired to create her therapy center, and the choir itself by her experiences overseas.

“I’ve been a certified music therapist since 2010, where I started off working internationally in the Caribbean, and then came back to Canada to learn more at school,” she said. “I decided I wanted to have a center that was kind of like how I experienced in the Caribbean, where it’s very community based, looking at people’s whole lives, and not just coming in for an hour of therapy and then leaving.”

The overarching mission of the initiative and Julia’s Place is to promote the learning of new skills, maintaining skills that a person has in order to stay healthy and active and restore skills lost due to degenerative diseases, injury, accident or non-use.

“We have two main goals,” Kowaleski said. “The first one being to maintain the physical body and mind, keeping it as healthy as possible through music. We use music to activate different areas of the brain, and we do this in order to facilitate change or the learning of new skills, or maintain current skills,”

“The second goal is to basically reduce social isolation for older adults or those with disabilities by creating a space where anybody who wants to sing can come and they can come as a family,” Kowaleski added.

She said that music has a deep connection to the health and general well-being of people, and while there are no immediate plans for more events in Orangeville, she is hopeful to put together similar events in the future.

“I always like to say music is essential. It’s great and enjoyable, but there’s so many more ways that it can be used to help keep you healthy or to restore your health. It really is something that we need more of.”

For more information about musical therapy, and Julia’s Place, go to ‘www.juliasplacemusictherapy.com’.

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