Village Harmony Updates

• Village Harmony Zoom Programs for university, high school and community choirs

  Expand your choir’s repertoire during the Zoom era

  Village Harmony has developed an ever-expanding online teaching resource library for choir directors looking to collaborate via zoom with expert teachers across the globe.

  Our aim is dual-fold. The project provides much-needed income to our teachers. And the program provides a valuable interface for singers of all levels to learn songs directly and authentically from musician experts in many of the worlds greatest non-Western choral traditions: from South Africa, the Republic of Georgia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Corsica, Cuba and the American Appalachian and African-American communities.

  Using Village Harmony’s online learning platform, resources provided to participating choirs include digital rehearsal material—audio or video individual voice part recordings and performance tracks, scores /wordsheets/translations, pronunciation tracks, background resources. These back-up teaching files compliment a live zoom lesson that we set up for your choir with a 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.

  We can offer your choir a tailor-made one-off workshop, multi-week or semester-long program, or even a year-long series of guest teachers.

  Contact Mollie Stone at molliestone@uchicago.edu to what we might offer for your own choir and to set up a private zoom meeting for a tour of our programs.

• 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.