Our Teachers

Matlakala Bopape, of Polokwane, South Africa, is the director of internationally-renowned Polokwane Choral Society—a community-based group whose aim is nurturing musical talent in African society.

As a director, Matlakala is committed to drawing out musical excellence from her singers, as well as exposing them to musical cultures of the world. Her limitless patience, careful attention to vocal technique, and rich repertoire of folk and contemporary South African choral music make her a formidable teacher.

Matlakala’s has been collaborating as a teacher with Village Harmony many times (in the UK, in the EU and, in 2025, at our first camp in New Zealand) since her first VH program in Italy in 2000, which followed a fortuitous initial meeting with Patty & Larry at Festival 500 in St. John, Newfoundland the previous summer.

Bongani Magatyana is a professional singer /music director /composer /theatrical producer living in Khayelitsha 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 and taught hims son how to read and write tonic solfa music notation at a young age. Today Bongani conducts a 120-voice OAC choir himself, as well as a community male choir and a large children's choir. A dancer as well as singer, and he is particularly adept at communicating the elusive rhythms of South African songs.

Currently Bongani teaches at the Zolani Centre in Langa Township, leads an educational musical theatre company and the Khayelitsha Children's Choir, and continues to compose music in a variety of genres, bringing vibrant performances to communities across Cape Town.

Bongani’s folk-inspired choral compositions—popular pieces for South Africa’s major choral competitions—are sung by choirs around South Africa and internationally. Both Yale and Harvard Universities have commissioned Bongani to write choral works for their ensembles.

• Corsica

• Georgia

• South Africa

• Italy

• Winter Weekend

Patty Cuyler, a dynamic workshop leader and choral director internationally-renowned for her expertise in teaching Corsican, Georgian and South African music became co-director of Village Harmony in 1995 and has been the organization’s sole director since Larry Gordon’s death in late 2021.

Over the years Patty spear-headed the expansion of Village Harmony’s reach into the four corners of the globe. It was primarily her vision and labor that shaped VH’s response to the pandemic year and launched our online programs.

Patty founded the community world music choir Boston Harmony in 2005 and the Chicago World Music Chorus in 2013. She currently makes her home in Marshfield VT.

Natalie describes herself as a classically trained vocalist-turned-folk music geek, influenced by too many genres to list. She is a classically trained vocalist, instrumentalist, composer, choral director, and performer since childhood with roots in opera and Ukrainian folk and choral music; specializing in traditional vocal styles of Eastern Europe with additional experience in American folk, pop, rock, jazz and musical theater.

A seasoned recording artist, soloist, ensemble vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Natalie is a choral director and vocal teacher with a repertoire spanning 50+ languages and over a dozen distinct vocal styles from around the world.

She is bilingual (Ukrainian & English), some French, and is a creative, adaptable and organized ethnomusicologist.

Some of her performance highlights: Orchestra Hall with Minnesota Orchestra, The Guthrie Theater, Fitzgerald Theater, "A Prairie Home Companion," and others. Her specialties: Traditional Eastern European vocal styling, coaching, composition, with special emphasis on timbres, diction and complex ornamentation.

Igor Dimovski, was born in 1987 in Dracevo, Macedonia and began playing music at 7 years of age. He graduated with a degree in music theory and pedagogy and is now known as one of the most sought after accordionists in Macedonia and beyond.

Igor leads and arranges for his band, Pauza za Rakija, which has 3 Youtube long play videos - two of which have more than 1 million hits from all over the former Yugoslavia and diaspora. They are fully booked, traveling throughout their country and abroad for gigs, concerts and weddings. Igor also has his own recording studio where he produces videos of traditional Macedonian music.

At Village Harmony camp, Igor will present a set of his own arrangements of traditional songs from his band’s repertoire. Igor will organize all of our concerts mostly in the Ohrid area - at monasteries, with other folk ensembles, and with his band. We will spend a day in the village of his grandfather eating traditional food, dancing and singing a concert for the villagers. Our final concert will be a collaboration between his band and Village Harmony.

• New England Adult Camp

• Family Camp & Memorial

Based in Brattleboro, Vermont, Brendan Taaffe has been leading singing workshops around the world since 2004. An active composer, he specializes in American harmony styles and Zimbabwean makwayera style singing. In 2011, Brendan spent a month working with choirs in Zimbabwe to document songs from that tradition. He is a founding member of the Bright Wings Chorus and directs Turtle Dove, an organization that runs singing camps for adults. Brendan is also a multi-instrumentalist on guitar, fiddle, banjo, and mbira and holds an M.A. in performance from the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick.

Nadia Tarnawsky has been studying Eastern European singing techniques for nearly three decades. In 2002 she received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship which allowed her to travel to Ukraine to collect folk songs and folklore. She has taught Ukrainian village style singing in workshops for the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York city, Village Harmony in Vermont and Oregon, the Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble in San Francisco, and the Black Forest Fancies in New Orleans among others. In 2011 she received a Traditional Arts Fellowship from Artist Trust. She sang under the tutelage of Yevgeny Yefremov with Ensemble Hilka of New York in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine. A recording of this repertoire was recently released on the Smithsonian Folkways label.

Suzannah Park, a native of Asheville NC, is a performer teacher, activist, organizer and community leader. She comes from a family of three generations of traditional Appalachian, English and Irish singers, storytellers and dancers.

She has been touring and teaching for the past twenty plus years, both in the USA and abroad. She began singing with VH when she was twelve and touring with Northern Harmony at fourteen. One of VH most popular teachers, Suzannah became our acting Board President in 2018 and joined the executive team in 2021.

Founder and director of the Wild Asheville Community Chorus—now under the umbrella of VH—Suzannah was also a founding member of two VH alumni groups, the Starry Mountain Singers and the Starry Mountain Trio. She is also a member of the traditional music faculty and choir director at Warren Wilson College.

As an activist Suzannah wears the program director hat for a local NC non-profit, Community Roots. With a focus on environmental justice and the ‘rights of nature’ movement. She is also a counselor, teacher and organizer with a focus on women and Native liberation within the framework of the international peer-based counseling community, Re-evaluation Counseling. www.suzannahpark.com

• Corsica

• Georgia

• Online Course

Ketevan Mindorashvili was born in Sighnaghi in the eastern province of Kakheti in (the Republic of) Georgia. She was raised in a traditional singing family. Founder and director of the Zedashe Ensemble, Keto showed a gift for singing since childhood and continued to study music technique extensively in university. She devoted herself to preserving traditions on the brink of disappearance, and has become known as a singer and a teacher of Georgian folk music, particularly the fluid ornamentation of eastern folk songs. She has a deep knowledge of ancient church chant, and is a master of the panduri, the three-stringed lute from the eastern Georgian region of Kakheti.

Keto has searched valleys and mountains for ancient polyphony, collecting folk songs and chants, as well as writing her own music within the tradition. Today she hosts students from all over the world in her native Sighnaghi and travels internationally leading tours of Zedashe and teaching workshops. She has appeared on all Zedashe recordings to date, and has participated in numerous tours to the United States, United Kingdom, and throughout Europe. Keto has been teaching VH groups in Georgia (and in Corsica in 2014) since 2003.

Bio coming…

Liam Kantor is a vocalist and instrumentalist based in Evanston, IL. From an early age, he was steeped in the world of traditional music, learning fiddle tunes and folk dances from his teachers and family alike. During the pandemic, he spent a year in Marshfield, VT, working with Village Harmony, to organize workshops and perform online concerts with Northern Harmony.

Currently pursuing a degree in ethnomusicology, Liam's musical interests span a wide range of traditional folk styles from around the world with a focus on New England-style and Celtic fiddle music and traditional ballads of those regions.

Liam has a particular passion for finding ways to bring people into community through art and, particularly those who might not think to find connection through art. Thus, drawn to community-based musical traditions, he finds himself most at home singing in choirs, playing in jam sessions, and trading songs around campfires.

Teen Camp I

A native of Montpelier, VT, Sinead O’Mahoney has been singing with Village Harmony and Northern Harmony for over a decade. She has traveled abroad with Village Harmony in Corsica, France, Switzerland, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and has made three trips to Caucasus Georgia, including an intensive Georgian language course. She has been active in Sacred Harp and other shape-note singing throughout New England, and became a co-director of VH’s community choir Boston Harmony in 2018. She co-led the Mettabee Village Harmony choir with Larry Gordon in 2019-20 and helped host many Village Harmony online workshops. She has been praised for her sure command of rhythm and clear and efficient teaching style. Sinead earned her bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Vermont in 2016. She currently lives in Boston, Mass. USA.

Polina Shepherd (Skovoroda) was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. Whilst living in Tatarstan, Central Russia in the 1980-1990s, she was one of the visible young Jewish activists during her student years, just as the Jews of Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. Helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in an industrial town Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from her locals, performing, forming her own band, she was learning about being Jewish in Russia. At the age of 17, she joined Russia′s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, and toured with them all over the Former Soviet Union, at the same time studying her musical heritage further. By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir leader, composer, bandleader, an international touring musician and festival organiser. Having witnessed the phoenix of Jewish culture rising from the ashes of Communism and helping it is flourish and develop throughout the FSU, she is now part of the international world of Ashkenazi culture. Moved to the UK in 2003.

The latest and so far most ambitious project is 150 Voices, a recorded collaboration between Polina, the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics Lorin Sklamberg and choirs in the UK and the USA (CD 150 Voices, 2020). It explores the connection between the Steppes and the Shtetl through folk and art songs, arranged specifically for this project, and newly composed originals. Apart from the original choirs, the Sklamberg - Shepherd Duo offer workshopping and performing it with any group choir in the world.

Her composition is focused on East European styles with an influence of classical music and folk elements. About 120 compositions including music for theatre shows, large scale choir compositions, settings for Yiddish poems, piano work, and nigunim performed by soloists and choirs all over the world.

• Teen Camp II

• Family Camp & Memorial

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 graduated from the New England Conservatory with a Masters in Contemporary Improvisation.

Read more about Lysander’s work.

Georgia

Zedashe ensemble (ანსამბლი ზედაშე) is a polyphonic vocal choir and dance group from the nation of Georgia. Directed by Ketevan Mindorashvili, Zedashe is one of the few mixed (male and female) choirs in Georgia led by women. The ensemble was founded in Georgia the mid-1990s to preserve the polyphonic folk songs and chants, unique to Georgia, that were largely lost during the Communist era. These chants run through the heart of Georgia’s rich history, through Orthodox Christian liturgical services to the nation’s ancient pagan roots.

Zedashe has released eight full-length albums, toured across Georgia and internationally at various festivals and universities in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, and United States. In addition to their performances, Zedashe often holds day- to week-long workshops, either connecting with specific local choirs or simply open to those interested in the Georgian culture. Members of Zedashe have been teaching and touring with Village harmony since 2003.

For more information visit their website HERE