4 PM (doors open at 3:30 PM)

Stillpoint is proud to welcome Peter Halperin and his Group Therapy Trio. Peter will sing all-original songs on guitar and keyboards, with Jim Orr on bass and vocal harmony, and Chris Knott on lead acoustic guitar. The name of the trio flows from Peter’s core belief that musical performance brings musicians and their audience together in a group experience that is fundamentally interactive and mutually sustaining. After years of offering group therapy to medical patients dealing with life-threatening illness, he deeply experienced the therapeutic power that always comes forward when people share intimate emotional experiences. Sharing music and songs is an especially powerful example of this process, and we hope that everyone in the audience and on stage leaves with a bit more joy in their hearts than when they arrived.

About Peter

Peter Halperin is a lifelong musician who started with classical piano at the age of five. In his early teens he began songwriting, playing guitar and piano, and before graduating high school in New York was playing the Greenwich Village coffeehouses, such as Folk City and the Gaslight. He was a full-time musician in the early 1970s, opening for such luminaries as Randy Newman, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Happy and Artie Traum, and Bob Dylan. 

By the time he moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1990 he had become a psychiatrist specializing in integrating mental-health treatment as a routine part of medical care, especially with cardiac and cancer patients, and used group psychotherapy as a core component. Meanwhile, on Island in the early 1990s, he performed with Michael Johnson and the band Miracle Cure, as well as co-leading the Eclectics. He then left for what he calls his “whaling trip,” to establish a major medical-student education program in integrated medicine at Stony Brook Medical School, and then to establish one of the first programs that fully integrated psychiatric consultation into primary care, at Mass General Brigham’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. 

Returning to the Vineyard in 2021, he continued to compose and perform, and became a full-time musician again. He built a performance and recording studio, Woodstove Studios, on his property in West Tisbury and hosts monthly concerts by and with local and off-Island musicians. These are recorded and aired on his “Woodstove Studios Presents” MVYRadio show on Sundays at 7 p.m. He also does deep-dive conversations with these artists, listening to their recorded music together, and getting behind the artistic and personal stories within the music. In 2023, he went to Nashville and recorded Bring on the Storm, an album which he regards as his life work (so far!). With 13 songs he composed between 1969 and 2023, it was released nationally. On Island, he has performed with a seven-piece band at the Grange Hall, and at his own studio, Pathways, the PA Club, and many other venues, solo or with smaller groups.