Rachel Hassinger, Director of Music

Photo Credit: Meredith Nierman

Rachel Hassinger is a music director, piano teacher, and skilled touch practitioner. She has been making music collaboratively since she was a child; accompanying choruses, church choirs, chamber musicians, and orchestras on piano; singing in choirs and musical theater; and playing percussion with orchestras as well as symphonic and marching bands. She studied piano performance at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she took conducting and piano pedagogy classes and performed with various ensembles and soloists, while studying sociology at Oberlin College. She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelors of science in interdisciplinary studies from Boston University. Her piano, choral conducting, and voice teachers have included Jean Fox, Benjamin Whitten, Peter Takács, Sanford Margolis, Ellen Oak, Millie Beane, and Elizabeth Vrenois, among others. 

She worked as a digital communications manager and content editor for national and international public health nonprofits for over a decade, and had the joy of leading the content development of the Leonard Bernstein Centennial website, the first iteration of classical.org, for GBH and CRB. 

In addition to serving as music director of FUMC Melrose, Rachel leads JP Jubilee, a large, community seniors chorus in Jamaica Plain; teaches piano and composition to children and adults; and is a licensed massage therapist and Certified Zero Balancing practitioner.