International Camps

After the rehearsal week, each session takes its show on the road. Residential camps—in Macedonia and Georgia— will wrap up with a short concert series within driving distance of their retreat center.

For participants in the traveling camp sessions, however—this past summer in the Madagascar camp—the adventure is just beginning. After the first concert, everyone and everything gets packed up as the group embarks upon a concert tour. While on tour the ensemble travels nearly every day—stopping en route to explore sites of interest—with performances sprinkled along the way. The combination of intense immersion in new repertoires and the myriad challenges of polishing concert performances to a high sheen are exhilarating for all involved, and produce a close community by the end of camp.

Whether they attend a camp in the US or overseas, most campers emerge from their stint in Village Harmony with broadened cultural horizons. In past years, singers have come from all over North America and from many other countries (England, Australia, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Caucasus Georgia, Israel, New Zealand, Ghana, Cuba, Singapore, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, Bosnia) to participate in our summer camps. We have a international staff of singers, instrumentalists and composers who are fluent in a wide range of traditions, including American shape-note, Appalachian and gospel music; South African folk music; Bulgarian, Macedonian Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian music; polyphony from Corsica and Caucasus Georgia; and Western baroque and renaissance music.