New England Adult Camp – July 15-22, 2017 – $750

Date: July 15-22, 2017
Venue: Buxton School
Leaders: Kathy Bullock, Bongani Magatyana, Larry Gordon, Lysander Jaffe
Price: $750, $50 supplement for double room, $100 supplement for single room

THIS CAMP IS ALREADY FULL BUT YOU MAY SIGN UP ON THE WAITING LIST (WITH NO APPLICATION FEE); OFTEN SPACES DO OPEN UP .

This camp features a particularly exciting trio of leaders.

Bongani Magatyana, from the townships of Capetown, South Africa, has an especially deep knowledge of South African traditional music and culture and he is a truly great teacher with an particularly clear way of imparting the sometimes elusive rhythms of traditional South African singing and dancing. He is also a wonderful composer of new songs in the folk style. His infectious enthusiasm can coax a big South African sound out of even the most timid singers.

Dynamic gospel leader Kathy Bullock from Berea, KY will lead the group in a set of black spirituals and gospel music, weaving history into the singing as the group explores the connections between African American music, history, and its African origins. The amazing Dr. Bullock always brings a deep love and passion for music to her teaching, and generates infectious excitement in its performance.

Village Harmony founder Larry Gordon will lead shape-note, Balkan and Corsican songs, and a set of haunting short pieces by Estonian composer Urmas Sisask. Larry will also lead English country and contra dance sessions each evening with music performed live by Village Harmony alumnus Clayton Clemetson and others.

Our new venue for this camp is Buxton School in Williamstown, Mass, which has a beautiful campus with several excellent singing and dancing spaces and a range of accommodations.

Basic rooms are shared (4-bed) occupancy. Participants can choose to reserve single or double rooms for a supplemental fee of $100 or $50, respectively.

The camp will conclude with two concerts: Friday night at Buxton School, and Saturday afternoon, an hour’s drive east, in Ashfield Mass.

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Leaders

Kathy Bullock

KATHY BULLOCK has been a Professor of Music at Berea College in Kentucky for 23 years, where she chairs the department, teaches theory and ethnomusicology, and directs the Black Music Ensemble, a 70- voice choir that specializes in the performance of African-American sacred music. She is a member of the American Spiritual Ensemble and she performs, lectures, and leads workshops in the United States, Great Britain, Ghana, and Jamaica on music and culture of the African diaspora.

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Bongani Magatyana

BONGANI MAGATYANA is a professional singer /music director /composer /theatrical producer living in Gugulethu Township in Cape Town, South Africa.

He was born in Cape Town in a township called Old Crossroads; his father was a self-taught choir conductor in the Old Apostolic Church. Bongani’s father taught him how to read and write tonic solfa music notation at a young age, and young Bongani dreamt of becoming a church choir conductor, too. Today he conducts a 120-voice OAC choir himself, as well as a community male choir.

Bongani’s folk-inspired choral compositions—popular pieces for South Africa’s major choral competitions—are sung by choirs around South Africa and internationally. Currently Bongani teaches at the Zolani Centre in Langa Township, leads an educational musical theatre company, and continues to compose music in a variety of genres, bringing vibrant performances to communities across Cape Town.

Bongani has been teaching with Village Harmony since 2012, co-leading annual study-performance camps and workshops in South Africa, the US and the EU. A dancer as well as singer, and he is particularly adept at communicating the elusive rhythms of South African songs.

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Larry Gordon

Village Harmony founder and director LARRY GORDON has been making community music in Vermont since the early 1970s. He founded Village Harmony in 1989, and his patient and relaxed, yet demanding, teaching style and his collaborative approach have shaped the welcoming atmosphere of the Village Harmony community since the beginning. Though his first love was medieval and renaissance music, he is a vital figure in New England shape-note singing, and he is the music editor of the popular Northern Harmony shape-note songbook. 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. 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 ad hoc incarnations of Northern Harmony, a semi-professional tour group made up largely of veteran Village Harmony singers. Recently he has been devoting increasing time to teaching Balkan folk dancing.

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Lysander Jaffe

LYSANDER JAFFE is a singer, violist and co-artistic Director of Palaver Strings, a chamber orchestra and nonprofit based in Portland, ME. He is also a founding member of Culomba, a genre-defying new vocal ensemble based in Boston. A devoted student of traditional music, he has studied with master musicians in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Greece, Corsica, and Georgia. In 2017, he appeared as a soloist with the Cambridge Revels in Sanders Theatre. In 2018, he was awarded an Apprenticeship Grant in Traditional Arts from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to support his studies of the unique violin tradition of Epirus, Greece.

As a teacher, Lysander is passionate about broadening the cultural horizons of students of all backgrounds. He has taught world polyphony styles for Village Harmony since 2013 and has toured Europe several times with its professional ensemble, Northern Harmony. In 2020, he will graduate New England Conservatory with a Masters in Contemporary Improvisation. Read more about Lysander’s work.

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Venue

Buxton School

The Buxton School, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has a beautiful spacious campus, with gorgeous trees and nearby walking trails. There are several good singing spaces, a beautifully appointed dining room, and well-equipped industrial kitchen.

Accommodations are in two different buildings, and every room is different The rooms are mostly triples and quads, but since there are more rooms than we need, we are able to allocate some rooms as doubles and a few as singles, for an additional supplement.

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