Women Singing

With Melanie DeMore, Terry Garthwaite, Kate Munger, and Becky Reardon

August 9th-13th
Basic ($540-840*)

August 8th-13th
Extended ($675-975*)

 

*Sliding scale, costs beyond base amount will be donated to teachers

REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS CLOSED – You can join a waitlist below

Women Singing in Circle: Led by four celebrated singer/songwriter/teachers, this retreat is a daily immersion in the joys of singing harmony in the incomparably beautiful acoustics of Lama’s spacious adobe dome.

We’ll be learning songs and rounds celebrating life, holding up community, opening hearts, encouraging resistance, and entertaining playfulness. Special sessions feature offerings based on each teacher’s unique musical paths.

One evening, the participants usually invite Lama staff to come to the dome and be serenaded by lullabies. And traditionally the last evening is a free-wheeling salon where retreatants can share songs, skits, and dances with their sister singers.

Sight-reading is not necessary, although written music will be provided for many of the songs.

This retreat was in its 16th year before COVID forced a hiatus in 2020.

Mel, Kate, Terry and Becky are overjoyed to be able to return to the
mountain this summer and sing in circle live again.

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Melanie DeMore is a 3 time Grammy nominated singer/composer, choral conductor, music director, and vocal activist who believes in the power of voices raised together. In her presentations, DeMore beautifully brings her participants together through her music and commentary.

DeMore facilitates vocal and stick-pounding workshops for professional choirs, and community groups as well as directing numerous choral organizations across the U.S, Canada, and beyond. She is a featured presenter of SpeakOut!-The Institute for Social and Cultural Change, the Master Teaching Artist for Music at UC Berkeley/ CalPerformances; works with everyone from Baptists to Buddhists, and was a founding member of the Grammy-nominated ensemble Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir. She became Music Director for Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks as part of the Luminato Festival in 2019. She is a charter member of Threshold Choir founded by Kate Munger and conducts song circles with an emphasis on the voice as a vessel for healing.

In her own words: “A song can hold you up when there seems to be no ground beneath you.”

Kate Munger has been passionate about community singing since she was 8 years old at Girl Scout Camp and has led community singing now for over 45 years. In 2000 she founded the first of now 200 Threshold Choirs around the world, bringing together singing in service and honoring the sacred process of grief.

Today at 73 she is retired and has returned to her passion of singing at the bedsides of people who are dying, in coma and with folks who are incarcerated. She is a gracious, skillful musical host and choral director whose joy is reminding us that we are singing beings, bringing community singing back to “the community.” Kate knows that this work is deep and serious and she offers a fresh, lively, sometimes irreverent, always relevant perspective.

Becky Reardon’s voice is familiar to the millions of people who hear her sing on the Charlie Brown/Peanuts TV specials. She is a composer whose songs and rounds are widely sung by community and university choirs, song circles, and music classes. Sometimes jazzy and fun-loving, sometimes trance-inducing and deeply spiritual, her music always conveys her passion for the natural world and the cycles of life.

Becky is currently working on a musical about a women’s singing circle, and hopes to begin workshopping it later this year. She co-produced an illustrated songbook of some of her most popular rounds and songs last year, with art students from the Taos, NM, Middle School. She is thrilled to be singing live in circle again.

 

Terry Garthwaite cooks with rhythm. She inhabits her songs– passionate rhythmic affirmations that pulse in the bones, seeding comfort and joy. She writes “spirit jingles“ to strew the seeds of compassion and strength, harmony and joy; to create connection and expand community; to dispel fear, empower, and weave a magic spell of well-being. Embodying the improvisation of jazz, expression of blues, textures and tones of world music, and the heart of a healer, Terry makes music that opens you to the joy of living.

Terry is a pioneer in contemporary music made by women. An original member of the groundbreaking ‘60s rock band “Joy of Cooking”, she now leads chant, rhythm, and creative singing workshops, and writes complex, pithy, humorous, memorable rounds and chants.

In performance, Terry has shared the stage with such artists as BB King, Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, The Band, Allen Ginsberg, Rosalie Sorrels, and Santana at venues that include Carnegie Hall, the Joseph Papp Theater, the Hollywood Bowl, and Canadian Folk Festivals. She’s twice been awarded the Marin Arts Council’s Composers grant.

Terry’s songs in her signature style are bursting with humor and rhythmic and melodic surprise.