Peggo Horstmann Hodes wants the world to sing, no experience necessary.

That’s been one of her jobs at the Concord Community Music School. She’s conducted the all-female Songweavers Chorus the past 12 years and at one time had about 100 singers, before the pandemic sliced that number in half.

She’s retiring this summer, after the current semester at the CCMS. The school is searching for a replacement. Meanwhile, Horstmann Hodes saw singing as a unifying force, and whether you sang like a bird or honked like a goose hardly mattered. To Horstmann Hodes, singers were people who sang, period, and anyone could do that.

Come one, come all, bird or goose. She’d inject the emotion and sensations later with her waving hands and body language.

“If there is one thing I have tried to give my singers and our audience, it is that love fuels connection and happiness,” Horstmann Hodes said. “Singing together allows us to send our love out through our voices to other people, to strangers, friends, and family.”

Those she touched over the past dozen years returned the favor last weekend, rolling out the red carpet at the South Congregational Church to honor her following her retirement announcement.

The line to get in spilled out of the church’s entrance and traveled to North State Street. Horstmann Hodes received a standing ovation. At the conclusion, she turned to pay tribute to her supporters, of which there were many.

“The reception at the concert was a bit overwhelming, honestly,” Horstmann Hodes said. “I was bowled over and very touched. The whole evening was a love-fest. Friends told me they could feel the love coming off the singers and going back and forth between the singers and me and the audience.”

Her initial education was self-taught, a girl in preschool singing all around the house. She gained poise singing solos at her church. She joined a few bands and played the acoustic guitar and sang. Mostly folk music. Joan Baez, and Peter Paul and Mary.

She competed in Battle of the Bands events, played at high school dances and proms and immersed herself in folk music.

“I was just too young for Woodstock,” Horstmann Hodes said.

She couldn’t recall the name of her first band, but she didn’t skip a beat when asked for her first teacher 60 years ago.

“Mrs. Thideman,” she said, a trace of excitement in her voice.

Later came adulthood. She married her guitarist, Paul Hodes, who later joined the U.S. House of Representatives, and had kids. She holds an M.A. in elementary education, and an M.M. in vocal pedagogy from the New England Conservatory.

She’s soloed for the New Hampshire and Granite State symphonies. Yet, with all the talent she’s been associated with, she seemed to have a soft spot for people who had more passion than talent, who just wanted to let loose vocally, in front of a live audience, not a steering wheel.

Horstmann Hodes will continue to conduct the Northern Lights, which utilizes auditions to choose their roster. She holds three big choral rehearsals per week and no longer plays an instrument like in the old days, choosing to guide and mold her singers.

She uses her arms and hands to steer the singers in the right direction, put them on the same page.

“The nuance is using your arms to show feeling or mood, how it might slow down,” Horstmann Hodes said. “But it needs to be inspiring and we worked on making sure we were delivering an emotional thing, not a mental thing.”

She remembered one senior citizen in particular, an 82-year-old woman who had never sang with feeling in front of anyone, told at 5 years old that she wasn’t any good.

“She never sang until voice lessons in 1980 with me,” Horstmann Hodes said. “She would never sing out loud and the family never heard her.”

Enter the Songweavers Chorus, representing the Concord Community Music School, where no one is cast aside.

Horstmann Hodes sang with the woman, practiced with her, giving her reference points and confidence.

So later, she sang.

“Once, she told me that she sang with her family at Passover, Horstmann Hodes said. “She said she had never done that before. She was excited.”

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