Friends of Music at Guilford seeks additional voices for its Chambers Singers in preparation for its yearly “A Cappella à la Carte” event and 50th birthday party on Saturday, June 25, at a hilltop property in Guilford. The gathering will include a brief annual meeting, a festive potluck meal, and concert sets by the Singers and the Singcrony women’s quartet. Other music-making may emerge as plans develop. The Chamber Singers will perform love songs by Dowland, Elgar, Holst, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Young & Heyman, Healey Willan, and the group’s director, Tom Baehr; one or two others may be added. Rehearsals begin Monday, February 22, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Guilford Community Church. Contact Baehr at (802) 387-2796 or tombaehr@myfairpoint.net with questions or to join the group.

Guilford, Vt. – Friends of Music at Guilford, now in its 50th Anniversary Season, presents the second of three programs featuring Bolivian Baroque music from an archive of nearly 13,000 pages of recently collected manuscripts. The “Barroco Boliviano” concert begins at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 20, in the sanctuary of Guilford Community Church, just a mile south on Rt. 5 from Exit 1 off I-91 in Brattleboro.

This treasure trove of Baroque-era manuscripts was a sort of Holy Grail for musicologist Fr. Piotr Nawrot, a native of Poland who arrived in Bolivia in the early 1990s after spending a few years in Guatemala. He traveled the Bolivian countryside seeking out church elders with carefully hidden or, in some cases, unfortunately neglected materials first composed and performed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Spaniards took over that area of the Inca Empire, and then forgotten when the Spanish colonial period ended in the early 19th century. Fr. Nawrot has spent many years preparing a significant amount of this music for publication and performance by a new generation of musicians, both in Bolivia and around the world.