Village Harmony

Welcome

Village Harmony is the umbrella organization for a diverse range of choral, world music and harmony singing activities under the direction of Larry Gordon and Patty Cuyler.

Our ensembles include Northern Harmony, Boston Harmony, the Chicago World Music Chorus, the new Village Harmony Cross-Countries Choir and our many Village Harmony Summer Camp ensembles.

We keep singing!

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. Our virtual week-long and weekend workshops this summer proved to be remarkably successful. These were immersions in a uniquely Village Harmony way—with tradition bearers joining in each other’s courses as students and singers literally from around the world discovering just how intimate and rewarding distance-learning under our model can actually feel.


And we continue to reinvent ourselves with a border-crossing community chorus that will start rehearsing in mid-September.


Announcing the Village Harmony Cross-Countries Choir.

Join Boston Harmony/Chicago World Music Chorus directors Patty Cuyler, Larry Gordon, Mollie Stone & Sinead O’Mahoney as we combine forces and inaugurate the Village Harmony Cross-Countries Choir, welcoming singers from wherever they hail and importing guest teachers from across the globe for a year hell-bent on exploiting the magic of virtual collaboration.

Each rehearsal will include a lesson with a specialist musician from somewhere around the world zooming in to teach us a song and talk about their music. Rehearsals will involve active participation, with a lot of call-and-response learning.

Rehearsals will take place on the second weekend of each month, meeting for 1-1/2 hours on both the Saturday (from 8-9:30pm ET) and the Sunday (from 2-3:30pm ET) from September through April.

Intrigued? Read on.

Go here to register

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Village Harmony Updates

  • Village Harmony Digital Resource Library in the works

    Expanding choral repertoire beyond the Euro-centric norm

    We at Village Harmony are in the midst of preparing an online teaching resource library for choir directors looking to expand their virtual teaching repertoire outside the norm.

    The first song resource modules will spring from the groundbreaking virtual courses Village Harmony held during the summer months with singers and choir directors from Corsica, South Africa, Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Cuba and the Black gospel tradition.

    Each song module will include complete digital rehearsal material—audio or video individual voice part recordings and performance tracks, scores /wordsheets/translations, pronunciation tracks, background resources. These will be combined with an hour-long live zoom lesson set up with the tradition bearer, who will introduce and teach the voice parts directly to your students, model authenticity and provide essential historical and personal background about the song.

    A $200 fee will be charged for each digital+zoom lesson song module. The fee will go almost entirely to our tradition-bearer song leaders. Participating choir directors must be able to embed the digital teaching tracks online to ensure that they cannot be pirated.

    As the fall progresses we will be adding leaders and songs from other countries.

    Contact Village Harmony co-director Patty Cuyler for information and a current song/genre list: pattycuyler@gmail.com

  • Village Harmony’s BLM resolve

    We would also like to share with you our statement of resolve inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Village Harmony unequivocally believes that Black lives matter. We stand in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement and are engaging in systemic change to make this statement true in action as well as in words.

    Music organizations like Village Harmony can be blinded by the notions that music is a universal language and that sharing music can do no harm. This is a fallacy. As a predominantly White organization, we acknowledge that we need to take steps to dismantle the inequality embedded both in our country and in our organization. We apologize for not taking action sooner.

    We are working to address our shortcomings by:
    – creating new opportunities for collaborations with Black ensembles and hiring culture bearers from Black communities
    – developing better practices for crediting and compensating composers of music from the Black tradition;
    – investigating our organizational history of borrowing and appropriating music from Black communities and exploring reparations;
    – gathering educational materials to share with Village Harmony staff.

    The fire is lit and the time for action is now. We are growing, learning, listening and looking forward to forging a new chapter of Village Harmony.

    Thank you for joining us in doing our part to make our world more equitable and caring.