Camps and workshops
2009/2010 Midyear Weekend Workshops
South African Singing Workshop
Saturday November 7, 2009, 10 am-4:30 pm.
At The Lamb Abbey in Montpelier, Vermont
Workshop Application Form
- Application Form (pdf) • Online registration not available for this workshop.
Led by Patty Cuyler and Larry Gordon. A repertoire-building day to learn a set of wonderful new South African gospel arrangements, folk songs and protest songs—and their dance movements—in four-part harmony. We will learn all the songs by ear, but you will be sent home at the end with enough material (wordsheets, mp3 files and transcriptions) to enable you to teach these songs to your own choir. We’ll divide the day up with a pot-luck meal.
The all-day workshop will take place at Montpelier’s great new studio/performance space, The Lamb Abbey, next to the river in the “warehouse district” off Pioneer Street. For more information about, and directions to, The Lamb Abbey, go to: www.thelambabbey.com.
Faculty
Village Harmony founder and director LARRY GORDON has been making community music in Vermont since the early 1970s. He founded Village Harmony in 1988. Though his first love was medieval and renaissance music, he is a vital figure in New England shape-note singing. Larry is an inspired organizer with an unerring eye for good repertoire and a unique knack of pulling together interesting combinations of singers and letting them shine. His patient and relaxed, yet demanding, teaching style and collaborative approach have shaped the welcoming atmosphere of the Village Harmony community since the beginning. Larry has led Onion River Chorus in Montpelier since the late 1970s, and is well known across the US and internationally for leading stunning periodic adhoc incarnations of Northern Harmony, a semi-professional tour group made up largely of veteran Village Harmony singers.
Co-director PATTY CUYLER of Marshfield, Vermont, is an energetic, dynamic workshop leader and director with special expertise in teaching Corsican, Georgian and South African singing and dance music. Her passion for honest, direct music coaxes fierce, forthright singing out of even the most timid singers. An instrumentalist from an early age, Patty is a brass player and self-taught accordion player. Since 1995 she has co-directed Village Harmony and Northern Harmony with Larry; in 2002 she founded a women’s Corsican trio and began the Montpelier World Music Chorus and Boston Harmony in 2004. Patty has edited and published two volumes of The Folk Rhythm South African songbook series, as well as three books of Georgian folk and sacred songs. She has also compiled a large collection of her own arrangements of old gospel-quartet music.