The song books and the tiny cards asking people to help the needy were tucked away on little shelves in front of each of the cream and mint colored pews. On most days, people would come here to attend services, to reaffirm their spirituality. The Unitarian Universalist Church in Concord is a gathering place for some, a place for friends and neighbors and strangers to meet up and chat.
But on this night, about 50 people sprinkled about the small but spacious octagon-shaped sanctuary not for worship or for a vigil, but for something else, something deeply rooted in their spiritual tradition yet different than what they might normally see at a Sunday service.
Yes, there were songs about faith and there were people holding hands and there was time for reflection.
But there were also teenagers shimmying their bare feet about and signing American folk tunes – and songs in Ukranian, Croatian, Russian, Bulgarian.
“It’s a very euphoric feeling,” said Jacob Mullen, of Acton, Mass., before performing a concert at the church last Tuesday. Mullen, a tall and slender 16-year-old, is part of the Vermont-based Village Harmony touring group, which brings campers to little hamlets in the Northeast each summer to learn music and to entertain crowds.
The transient troubadours, aged 13 to 18, travel across the area for two weeks, visiting different nooks and crannies and performing in churches or community mess halls.
They ride together in the vans that bring them from location to location and they hold hands when they perform at concerts. They sing songs about love and loss and war. And they try to immerse themselves in the small communities they visit, if only for a few hours.
“We’re focused on community singing traditions. And we also exist because of the communities being very, very generous and open,” said Suzannah Park, the chief instructor of the 25 campers.
Park, 31, is tall and thin. She grew up going to music festivals with her father, a folk musician who’d bring her to different places each summer to square dance and sing ballads.
She talks about the campers she leads like they’re close family members.
“These kids just feel they’ve found soulmates in other kids that want to sing this much, that love making music, love singing in harmony. That’s one of the things that’s most exciting – getting to see how delighted they are to find each other, these musical peers that they get to have for life,” she said last week, a couple hours before the troupe performed in Concord. Park knows a little bit about meeting soulmates through the camp, where she attended several summer ensembles as a kid. She married a man she went to a Village Harmony session with.
When Park was 18, she began teaching at the camp, leading the nascent musicians in songs that have roots in the American folk scene.
She comes back every summer to lead a three-week session with two co-instructors, who teach some of the other songs performed, the ones that are sung in other languages.
A couple weeks ago, Park, along with Natalie Nowytski and Gideon Crevoshay, held a week-long practice session at a retreat center in Massachusetts set up for the nondenominational camp, where they presented the two hours’ worth of performance music to the unauditioned campers, and helped them memorize and perfect it.
Then, for the next two weeks, they hit the road and sing it.
They play in a different town each night, and they munch off pot luck suppers and breakfasts and stay in the homes of benevolent strangers who open their doors and hearts in exchange for sweet musical renditions.
Performing without any sort of real break night after night can take its toll on the singers, they said last week. But they eventually grow accustomed to it.
“It’s tiring, but it’s fun. You get used to it eventually,” said Tikko Freilich, a 15-year-old from Pawlet, Vt., who’s been attending Village Harmony sessions for the past few years.
It pays off, they said, when they get in front of the crowd, and get to sing and dance and see the wide smiles and bobbing heads like they did last week at the church. They sing mostly a cappella, but on a few songs some of the campers strum on their guitar or play their violins. They almost always sing barefoot, and they oftentimes ask those in the audience to sing along with them.
“It’s a lot of fun, and they put on a really good performance,” said Jack Wakelin, a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church’s music and worship committee, which organized the concert. The church has been hosting Village Harmony each summer for the past three years, and Wakelin said he expects to see campers back at the sanctuary crooning tunes next year.
“Music has always been a big part of our church, so our members like it,” he said.
Last Tuesday, as she was getting ready to perform for the people at the church, Fiona White, a 17-year-old from Greencastle, Ind., wearing a dress with little flowers on it, talked about how fun it is to travel around and sing. She talked about how she thinks of Park as like a parent and how she wants to live in New England some day.
“I decided after spending a few years in Village Harmony to go to boarding school in New England,” she said. “So I’m trying to spend as much time here as I can.”
The campers, she said, get to explore the places they visit and perform at, and buy little trinkets at nearby shops and see local sites.
But only for a short time.
Then they’ve got to head out and play somewhere else. Then it’s back on the road.
