A bright light in the world has gone out. On Sunday, June 15, Rosendale resident and globetrotting performer William “Bill” Vanaver died at the age of 81 following a prolonged illness, in the arms of his wife and lifelong creative partner, Livia Drapkin Vanaver. The couple are widely known as the co-founders and directors of the not-for-profit world music and dance troupe the Vanaver Caravan. They have three grown sons: Elijah, Shiloh and Gabriel, all born and raised in the Hudson Valley. Bill is also survived by his brother Warren.
The official cause of death was non-alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver caused by malfunctioning of the heart, according to Livia. The replacement mitral valve that Bill received 19 years earlier had simply worn out, resulting in damage to other organs, plus two tachycardia events while their company was conducting workshops in India in January. Though he had to be hospitalized there for ten days, “He wanted to stay. He was too weak to fly back early by himself,” Livia recalls. “We weren’t sure what to do, but we thought, ‘He’s rallied from so many difficult situations before.’”
Bill joked in a later Facebook post that “the medical care here is far more comprehensive and therefore effective than any I ever experienced in the US.” Indeed, funds for his original emergency mitral valve replacement in 2006 had been raised through an all-star concert at the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston, featuring musical friends and colleagues Pete Seeger, Natalie Merchant, the Klezmatics and Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. UPAC had just been taken over by the Bardavon 1869 Opera House, renovated and reopened: “It was the first big event they did at UPAC. We definitely got the outpouring then,” says Livia.
Born on September 1, 1943 in Minneapolis to a military family and raised in Philadelphia, Bill Vanaver never got a formal musical education, according to his wife. He simply absorbed it wherever he went, a “lifetime learner.” One of his oldest friends posted a reminiscence on Facebook about traveling to summer camp together in their mid-teens, when Bill was still interested mainly in the popular music of the day: early rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop. But awaiting their arrival at Circle Pines Center in Michigan was a folk music legend who would shape Bill’s tastes and destiny and eventually become a close friend. Livia takes up the tale: “When he got off the bus, Pete Seeger was sitting on the lawn, playing the banjo. Big Bill Broonzy was a cook at the camp.”
It was in hearing Seeger perform after dinner that same night that Bill Vanaver took a keen interest in the banjo, never to flag thereafter. It quickly became his primary instrument, although in his world travels, he eventually became adept at almost anything with strings – guitar, mandolin, fiddle, oud, pipa, tambura — along with a variety of drums. His obituary, written by the Caravan’s current executive director, Miranda Wilde Way, puts it this way; “He became a lifelong student of folk music traditions from around the world — studying with master musicians and dance and music culture carriers, collecting rare songs and instruments and developing a musical voice that was both deeply rooted and wildly original.”
While studying graphic design at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, Bill got involved with the folk music network in Philadelphia, and by 1964 had become part of the Old Time Banjo Project, which released two LPs. In the late 1960s he “won the first Philadelphia banjo contest,” Livia notes. “He was there every year. I remember seeing him on a platform, playing banjo on his own.”
But the two were not fated to meet until April 1971, when Bill was living at the Wildflower Collective in Saratoga Springs, a community of musicians. “Utah Phillips was his roommate!” says Livia. Meanwhile, she was studying dance at NYU, in her junior year, and “totally in love with Balkan dance and folk music,” then being popularized by Ethel Raim and the Pennywhistlers. At the Balkan Dance & Music Festival at Columbia University, Bill spotted young Livia Drapkin performing with a vocal ensemble called Zenska Pesma and was instantly smitten, asking a friend, “Who’s that girl?” Livia was equally impressed by Bill’s singing and playing a Bulgarian stringed instrument called the gadulka. She approached him afterwards, saying, “You were amazing.” At the afterparty, they got caught up in conversation and found that they had “such similar interests,” in Livia’s words. By morning they were a couple: “He came that night and never left…I knew I had met the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with.”
That summer, Bill got to know Pete Seeger as part of the first “singing crew” of the sloop Clearwater, while Livia visited Greece for the first time to attend a dance festival on the island of Paros. The following year, 1972, he wrote scores for the dances that Livia was choreographing for her senior project at NYU — his first serious foray into composition. They founded what would become the Vanaver Caravan, originally called the Coming Together Festival of Dance and Music, which is still the name of their corporate entity. In May of that year, they performed their first concert together, at the Washington Square Methodist Church. Says Livia, “We’ve been doing it ever since, in one form or another.”
In 1973 Bill recorded a self-titled solo album and became the first-ever recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study a musical instrument abroad: the lyra, in Crete, where he would come under the influence of eminent composer Giannis Markopoulos. Together they began seeking opportunities to perform in various European, Asian and African countries. They soon embarked upon the first of a series of tours on behalf of the New York State Department of State as “cultural ambassadors of goodwill,” in which they performed programs of Americana music in Greece, Tunisia, Cyprus and Italy. Wherever they went, they learned local songs and dances and acquired exotic instruments to bring home and study. They also began teaching that year, in New York City schools.
In 1974, they were living in a “very funky geodesic dome,” in Livia’s words, next door to Pete Seeger’s daughter Mika in Chelsea, a tiny town north of Beacon. Hearing that he lived “upstate,” they offered a ride home to a mime they’d met at a Young Audiences Arts for Learning event in New York City; “home” turned out to be Half Moon Farm in Tillson. “We came up the Thruway, saw Mohonk and fell in love. We met the mime’s landlady, Shelly Farkas, and asked her to call us if anything becomes available.” They then set off for a sojourn in Yorkshire, where they struck up a friendship with English folk music royalty Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. There they got an urgent message from Farkas, saying that there was a vacancy at the farm and asking them to cable a $180 down payment right away.
And so it came to pass that, in September 1974, the Vanavers settled down in the Town of Rosendale, later moving to their own home on Mountain Road. “It was so incredible finding the Hudson Valley. It has felt like such a deep vibrant home, and it attracts so many artists,” says Livia. “There’s nothing like it in the world.” Soon they released a delightful album called Landfall II on the Philo record label; got involved with the Arts Community organization in New Paltz, partnering with a wide variety of local arts entities; worked in theater, including doing music and choreography for a Theatre of the Open Eye production of A Thousand Nights and a Night in 1977. They started a family with the birth of their eldest son, Elijah, in 1978. “Bill had three sons he absolutely adored,” says Livia. “He played music for them each night before they went to sleep.”
It was through the Arts Community that the Vanavers began teaching classes locally, and Livia notes, “Up here, we’ve been deeply involved in schools since 1980. We’ve done school programs in Ulster, Dutchess and the Capital Region. We just did our 35th annual World Dance and Music residency in Beacon. Pete [Seeger] used to do that with us every year.” Indeed, it’s fair to say that a master class or a performance from the Vanaver Caravan has, for several generations now, become as iconic and essential a rite of passage as an environmental education day sail on board the Clearwater. Their arts-in-education programs continue to this day, along with Livia’s private dance classes for adults as well as children at various age levels. Bill taught World Dance and Music at Bard and Skidmore Colleges, and his videotaped banjo tutorials can still be viewed online at the Vanaver Caravan website, https://vanavercaravan.org/banjo, or on YouTube.
Over the years they continued to tour and to perform nationally and internationally, appearing at such major gatherings as the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Smithsonian American Folklife Festival, the Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, France, the Tanz & Folk Fest Rudolstadt Festival in Germany, Harbourfront in Toronto and the Sidmouth International Festival in England. They have also worked with the Friendship Ambassadors Foundation to use the arts for healing and reconciliation in Romania, Bulgaria and with 9/11 survivors, and with the NYU Global Dance & Music initiative Translucent Borders at a camp for Syrian war refugees in Lesvos in Greece. The Shakti Caravan dance exchange project in India has been ongoing annually since 2012.
The dance and music extravaganzas that Bill and Livia constructed together include Five American Sketches, from the repertoire of the Denishawn Dance Company; EarthBeat, a pastiche of traditional rhythms and associated dances from around the world; Into the Light, a Winter Solstice pageant based on the Scandinavian Lucia tradition and developed with Arm-of-the-Sea Theater in Saugerties; Pastures of Plenty, their show of Woody Guthrie songs accompanied by clog dancing; and Turn, Turn, Turn, a homage to the life and art of Pete Seeger. All of these major productions are still in the Vanaver Caravan repertoire and can be revived as needed.
Through all these years of performing, studying and teaching, Bill was also composing, most often for Livia’s choreography. A 1979 work based on a Georgian folktale, The Earth Shall Have Its Own, was orchestrated for the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in 2012. It premiered alongside The Ballad of Polly Vaughn, a “folk ballet” based on an Appalachian variant of a tragic traditional Irish song (also called “Molly Bawn”) in which a young hunter accidentally kills his white-clad sweetheart, mistaking her for a swan. In 1996 Bill composed P’nai El, based on the Biblical tale of Jacob wrestling with the angel, which was commissioned and first performed by the HVP and later recorded by the Moldova Philharmonic.
The last few years of Bill Vanaver’s life were largely dedicated to the composition of a major symphonic work called The Nine Greek Muses – “his COVID project,” in Livia’s words. Inspired partly by Jean Sibelius’ compositions derived from Finnish myths, each movement describing a particular Muse is composed in a folkloric musical modality and rhythm typical of a different region of Greece. He declared the work completed to his satisfaction last winter and dedicated it to Markopoulos. “The main thing he wanted before he left the planet was to see it performed, in Greece and in the Hudson Valley,” says Livia. “It’s our company’s commitment and our family’s commitment to see it done. The copyist had just finished the scores, and we were about to start reaching out.” Anyone interested in staging the piece can contact her at livia@vanavercaravan.org.
Meanwhile, though saddened by the passing of their visionary founder, musical guiding spirit and generator of endless terrible puns, who “brought joy, chaos, wonder and wisdom to every room he entered,” the Caravan rolls on undeterred. The troupe will perform this weekend at the Old Songs Festival in Altamont. The CaravanKids summer camp program for 4-to-8-year-olds gets underway on July 7. The SummerDance intensive for tweens and teens begins on July 14, culminating with a vaudeville-style variety show at the Rosendale Theatre on August 8. Still in progress is a multiyear capital campaign to build a new permanent headquarters, the Caravan Center, at Stone Mountain Farm in Tillson, where a younger generation of former campers, now arts administrators and teachers, will take the reins of the organization.
Bill Vanaver’s mortal remains were interred in the “green burial” section of the Rosendale Cemetery on June 17, but it’s clear from the outpouring of tributes on social media over the past couple of weeks that his impact on his fellow humans will live on for a long, long time. As befits someone whose talents first came to the attention of many residents of our region via an entertainment known as Into the Light, his efforts to ignite and sustain the light of music, joy and connection in hearts wherever he went will remain undimmed. A memorial celebration will be held at UPAC on September 14, with further details yet to be announced. To make a donation to help defray the accumulated costs of Bill’s medical care in his final months, visit https://gofund.me/e14ee268.
Join the family! 
