released March 6, 2017

Founded in 1990, Village Harmony is an organization based in Vermont dedicated to the study and performance of authentic harmony singing traditions from throughout the world. The organization includes an extensive program of summer singing camps, community world music choirs in the Boston area and elsewhere, a semi-professional touring ensemble Northern Harmony, and an expanding list of world music recordings, songbooks and publications. Each summer, in addition to six or more USA camps, we have two or three foreign camps. The present ensemble is comprised primarily of veterans of many previous Village Harmony summer touring sessions, both in the US and abroad. We rehearsed for a week in Marshfield, Vermont before taking our program on the road.

Bongani Magatyana is a remarkably dynamic singer/music director/composer/theatrical producer living in Gugulethu Township in Cape Town, South Africa who has worked extensively with Village Harmony over the last several years, both here in the US and in 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 very young age, and young Bongani dreamt of becoming a choir conductor, too. Today he is conducts a 120-voice OAC choir himself, and his folk-inspired choral compositions—popular pieces for South Africa's major choral competitions—are sung by choirs around South Africa and internationally.

Larry Gordon is the founder and co-director of Village Harmony 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 has been a vital figure in New England shape-note singing. Larry has led Onion River Chorus in Montpelier since the late 1970s and is well known across the US and internationally for leading many incarnations of Northern Harmony, a semi-professional tour group made up largely of veteran Village Harmony singers.