Dear friends,

If you’re looking for something international to do this summer, I’d love to invite you to join me in Kraków, Poland, for the 8th annual Extraordinary Music Workshop. This is a large event run by the Polish Dominican friars, wherein over 300 enthusiasts of church music meet for a week and pray morning prayer together, sing daily Mass, and have choir rehearsals, instruction in Gregorian and Byzantine chant, and also fit in a few walking pilgrimages (to Kraków Cathedral and Wawel Castle, as well as the Benedictine Abbey of Tyniec and a nearby Camadolese Monastery).

While the majority of the participants are from Poland and their sessions are in Polish, there is also an international track where all the instruction is in English. Last year we had people from 17 different countries in attendance! CMAA's own Richard Chonak was one of our singers, and wrote about it here.

We have a great faculty this summer, including
— Fr. Robert Mehlhart, OP, a wonderful German Dominican priest who leads the sessions on Gregorian chant;
— Fr. James Moore, OP, an American (Western Province) Dominican who will give the daily spirituality talks;
— Andriy Shkriabiuk, a Ukrainian deacon who leads the Byzantine chant sessions;
— Grace Feltoe, an Australian currently residing in Portugal, who will be teaching beginning polyphony/choral music;
— and me (I’ll be leading the advanced polyphony/choral music sessions).

There’s a special mid-week concert of baroque music from the Jesuit missions in Bolivia which I’m sure will be stunning.

With the current exchange rates, food and housing in Kraków for a week is quite reasonable, as is the cost of the workshop itself. The dates are Monday through Sunday, July 3-9, 2023, and if you’d like more information, please visit this link.

If you're on Facebook, there's a nice video invite here.

Feel free to DM me as well. I hope that many of you will attend! It’s a remarkable experience, and I’d love for you to be a part of it.