Teen Residential Camp – August 4-13, 2017 – $775
Date: August 4-13, 2017
Venue:
Ricki Carroll's House and Barn
Leaders:
Larry Gordon,
Will Thomas Rowan,
Lynn Mahoney Rowan
Price: $775
This is our nine-day camp, especially geared for teenagers new to Village Harmony, as well as for those who don’t have time to commit three weeks to a traveling camp.
During the first seven days, singers get to know one another, singing 7-8 hours a day as they absorb the basics of new vocal styles and prepare a concert program. The session will culminate with performances on the final Saturday evening in Ashfield and Sunday afternoon in Westminster West, Vermont.
Village Harmony founder Larry Gordon will teach American shape-note songs, music from South Africa, and some early music with instruments. He will also lead folk dancing each day, including contras, English country dances and Balkan dancing. Will Thomas Rowan and Lynn Mahoney Rowan will teach some of their original compositiions and arrangements, anceint Lithuanian songs and seasonal songs and ballads. Together with Larry they will also lead some Corsican songs.
The camp is in residence at Ricki Carroll’s delightful, spacious house and grounds in the center of Ashfield village. There is a wonderful swimming lake a few blocks away and $1 ice cream cones just up the street.
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.
WILL THOMAS ROWAN is a composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist who began singing with Village Harmony when he was 14. He performs with Windborne, a band made up of Village Harmony alumni, which has toured internationally as part of the State Department’s American Music Abroad program. He holds a masters in conducting from Bard Conservatory, and is also an award-winning composer who writes everything from ballads to symphonies. In his other musical endeavors Will has collaborated with Susan Cooper on a Scottish folk music-dance-fairytale at Revels North, sung in a Russian Orthodox Monastery choir, conducted a 25-piece orchestra with chorus at the Fisher Center at Bard, created West African/Anglo-Norse trance-fusion pieces with the Kidimandi percussion ensemble, and has performed covers of Lady Gaga on the banjo more than once. Will is an avid storyteller and delights audiences of all ages with his lively and tongue-in-cheek re-tellings of Norse Mythology. He is delighted to be bringing his friend and collaborator Artūras back to the US on the heels of their Village Harmony tour together in Lithuania last summer.
