Peter Merrick

Director of Music

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. 

Before joining Glenview in September 2011, he served as Director of Music at St. George’s United Church and the amalgamated Eglinton St. George’s United Church for 18 years. 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 toured Italy with the ESG choir, performing in St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, and San Marco in Venice, among other famous venues, and 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 Chair of the Toronto Centre of the Royal Canadian College of Organists. 

He is also a student of a century-old but still-radical approach to music education, the Dalcroze Method. He was awarded the Dalcroze Certificate by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 2010, and is a candidate for the Dalcroze License. As a church musician, his goal is a pastorally relevant music program that is both excellent and eclectic; he enjoys combining classical church music with world music, Celtic music, jazz, spirituals, and gospel music.

You can reach him by email, or at 416-690-3880 

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