A Women's Singing Circle

Carolyn McDade
March 20 to 22, 2009

Fri 6:30 dinner thru Sun lunch
Program$150+Room/Board$175
CEUs, scholarships, commuter rates

A long time favorite workshop, this weekend will call on music written by Carolyn and others, to come to an experience of song, poetry, art and ritual to sing a new dream of hope into being.  Carolyn McDade is a songwriter committed to the power of singing in personal and social transformation.
  
To register online, please click here.

Some years ago when I was young, fresh with life,I began to sing.I did not come from a singing family, yet I remember the day the piano was rolled into our home. My parents neither lauded nor condemned my exploratory jaunts into sound. This gave me a space that opened spontaneously to my life, where I did not have to announce or even know what would happen. It was an immersion - without pretention or expectation.

What I do remember, and re-enact each time I sing, is the fluid quality with which I moved, melting into a terrain of sound. It was a place and a time of deep washing, a gentle though passionate rubbing of my being on the rocks of a river that soaked and embraced me, then some time later rode me back in its strong current to my place on that piano bench, in a room with walls, and a life that ticked with regularity and plan, distinctness and expectation.

I was born and raised in Louisiana, though I have lived in New England for more than thirty years. I grew up with one sister in a Southern Baptist family. My parents both came from people rooted in the farmland and small towns of this rural state. Childhood was quiet, steady, insular. My father worked with farmers through the Department of Agriculture. My mother was a teacher and homemaker. Dad's work required frequent moves. Being shy and uninclined to sports, I turned to my piano and my sister for friendship.

For a full write-up of this program suitable for public posting, please click here