Camps and workshops
Summer 2012 Residential Adult Camps
New England August Adult Camp
August 12-19 , 2012 (7 nights)
Led by Larry Gordon, Valerie Mindel, Emily Miller
This 7-day session will be full of blow-out traditional music singing, including an eclectic selection of wonderful American and world-music harmonies.
Larry Gordon, founder & co-director of Village Harmony, will lead the group in South African and traditional and contemporary American shape-note songs, as well as a few Balkan and South African pieces. Village Harmony's favorite mother-daughter team--Val Mindel and Emmy Miller--will bring their marvelous humor, musicianship and vast repertoire of American folk music to the week. Bring your instruments to join in a pick-up dance band!
This session will be spent in residence at Rikki Carroll's house and renovated barn on quaint Main Street in Ashfield, MA. With Ashfield Lake across the street, a daily swim will be just steps away. Rehearsals will be held just down the road at the community church and town hall.
In residence in Ashfield, MA
$675
Leaders
LARRY GORDON has been making community music in Vermont since the early 1970s. He founded Village Harmony in 1988. Though his first love was medieval and renaissance music, he is a vital figure in New England shape-note singing. 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. His patient and relaxed, yet demanding, teaching style and collaborative approach have shaped the welcoming atmosphere of the Village Harmony community since the beginning. 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 adhoc incarnations of Northern Harmony, a semi-professional tour group made up largely of veteran Village Harmony singers.
VAL MINDEL, a veteran teacher at Village Harmony, is a versatile teacher, singer and instrumentalist. She focuses on teaching the mechanics of creating harmonies and arrangements as well as singing in small groups, using early American country, Appalachian, gospel and bluegrass repertory. She lives in southern Vermont and leads adult harmony workshops there and around the country. She was a member of the 1970s string band, Any Old Time, has performed and taught in Hong Kong, Canada, Scotland and England, and was a long-time instructor at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music.
EMILY MILLER, founding member of The Sweetback Sisters, was born in Kansas and raised in Hong Kong, where her family band performed traditional American music on television shows and in shopping malls throughout the city. A veteran of Village Harmony camps and Northern Harmony tours, Emmy regularly shares her extensive knowledge of country music through harmony-singing workshops (often taught in collaboration with her mother, Val Mindel) around the country. Emily recently earned a masters degree in speech pathology at Vanderbilt University.
AT Ricki Carroll’s House, Ashfield, MA.
Campers will be housed side by side in 2 houses on the quaint Main Street of town. With Ashfield Lake across the street a daily swim is only a few steps away. There’s a hot tub and sauna for night time relaxation and lots of room to just hang out. Rehearsals will be held down the road, in the Grange Hall, which has a hardwood floor and plenty of space with good acoustics.