From the moment Marybeth Hallinan sat down at a piano, there was a connection. It was a language she “already understood,” she said.
“It spoke to me in a way that very little has since,” Hallinan said.
The reason she chose the piano was because her sister Deb did. Not that she wanted to be just like her – in fact, Hallinan wanted to be better at it than her older sibling. That, and their mother Edythe required all her children to take music lessons.
The passion to learn the fine nuances of every key on the instrument was something that just felt right. She credits the piano with keeping her sane during her middle and high school years. She loved learning, and always has; the structure of public education just was not the best fit. But when it came to the piano, that quest for learning was simply a thirst that she just couldn’t quench.
And as she learned more and more, Hallinan had an inclination that teaching the piano would one day be her path in life. Teaching others comes natural, she said, and for more than three decades she has been an inspiration and mentor to countless young aspiring players – and adults – in the Monadnock region.
Hallinan grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts and called that home all the way through high school. She decided to graduate a year early because it came to a point she was just done with that phase of her educational journey.
“I didn’t want to be told what to do, I wanted to do,” she said. “I really just wanted to start living and experiencing life.”
At the age of 19, Hallinan moved to Colorado to begin living. She waited tables, tended bar and played in piano bars. She spent six years out west, even starting a singing telegram company. At the request of a bar customer, Hallinan put together a catchy jingle for their answering machine. That same person asked for a singing telegram. Soon enough, Hallinan was putting out flyers on people’s cars and business was good.
Colorado was exactly what she needed at the time, it was also where she began teaching piano. But Hallinan missed the East Coast and the change of seasons. The initial plan was to spend summers on the Cape and winters in Colorado. Then she got married and had kids.
By this time, she had moved to the Monadnock region, after first being introduced to the area by her father who lived in Jaffrey in the late 1980s.
“That was sort of how I ended up being aware of the area,” she said. “And you really quickly fall in love with it.” She has lived in the region for 32 years, and the last 27 in Peterborough.
Hallinan knew she wanted to teach piano, but it had to be for herself. She wanted independence and flexibility. So like she did with the singing telegram company, Hallinan put out flyers around town. Within five years she had upwards of 40 students. But it happened organically and through the many connections she had made in the area with musicians and music directors.
Hallinan said yes to a lot of things musically because it was a way to foster those relationships and work towards her ultimate goal of bringing people together.
“As soon as someone knows you’re musical, you become sort of a commodity,” she said. “And the ability to read music was a big, big help.”
She used to play various gigs around town and accompanied NHDI performances and Peterborough Players plays. Of course when she was young she wanted fame and to be recognized – what aspiring musician doesn’t? Then something changed, her passion for music became more personal than performative.
“What I learned along the way is that I prefer to bring that joy of music to others,” she said. And she found the best way to do that was through teaching and learning. Hallinan always took classes here and there and eventually knew she wanted to get her degree, which she did in education and teaching multicultural choral music – a degree she designed – from Goddard College in Vermont at the age of 40. She even got credit for her work as a choir director and private studio teacher.
Recently though, Hallinan retired her copy of John Thompson’s “Teaching Little Fingers to Play” – as she will no longer offer lessons to children. It also happens to be the same book she learned to play with. But she will miss it.
“It’s such a delight to watch a child unlock the mystery of reading music,” she said.
Hallinan describes herself as stubborn and that was evident when her first piano teacher told her mother not to bother with lessons because her hands were too small.
“I was going to show her,” Hallinan said. It was her middle school music teacher that had the biggest impact.
“She really saw some potential in me and pointed me in different directions, both musically and stylistically,” she said.
And the understanding of what her passions are and how she wants to embrace them is what led Hallinan to an “eclectic and self-directed little life.”
“I’ve been able to do the things I love and create a small economy around them,” Hallinan said.
As the granddaughter and daughter of singers, voice work always went hand and hand with the piano, and it led Hallinan to embark on choir directing in the late 1990s.
Hallinan loves bringing people together. And there’s no better way to do it, she said, than through music.
In 2008, following her mother’s passing, Hallinan founded Two Rivers Community Choir. She had just left a music director job at a church in Marlborough and “I knew I really still needed to be doing choral work.”
For Two Rivers, Hallinan wanted to explore music that not a lot of people were doing, lesser known songs from far away places. She was up to 45 singers last spring and while they haven’t met in person since the COVID-19 pandemic, the membership is still high. The hope is to do some community-based events in the fall. Last September she started an auditioned choir and has 10 members.
She has been the music director at the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church since 2017 and it couldn’t be a more perfect job.
Over the last handful of years, Hallinan has branched out even more, establishing a hiking and singing camp for adults, Voicings Adventure Singing Camp, which the idea came out of an email she got for a similar camp, only for kids. As she drove down Interstate 70 in Colorado after seeing the email, Hallinan made the decision to give it a try. The next camp is Aug. 6-8.
She also started Fundamentally Harmonic, offering in-person sound healing sessions, using a short, gentle gong bath, Tibetan and crystal singing bowls, and therapeutic tuning forks. Once again, the idea came out of an experience Hallinan had at a workshop a decade earlier.
“It’s a very powerful modality of bringing the body into residence with itself,” she said.
As for her next flyer on the car windshield, Hallinan would love to get into eldercare. She started assisting someone during the pandemic and it was another immediate connection.
“What I discovered is I love helping our elders stay in their home,” she said. While she’s not there yet that will be another detour along her winding path.
Right before the world shut down, Hallinan married her husband Ray Dodge last February, and instead of a warm tropical honeymoon, they took a two-week trip to Canada and Maine.
Hallinan said she’s never really had a hobby – probably because she has so many other things going on. Yet during the pandemic she began growing flowers and has found great joy in it.
The same can be said about the region she settled down in decades ago.
“This community has been a place where I could keep expanding into who I am,” Hallinan said. “They have embraced every flyer on the windshield.”