Norfolk Gallery Quire

has ceased meeting.

Norfolk Gallery Quire at Wymondham Festival. photo © Rosie Gutteridge

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Elizabeth Gutteridge
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CD, Norfolk Gallery Quire
live at Walpole Old Chapel

West Gallery music revives the repertoire and style of hymn singing in the village churches of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

High in galleries at the west end of the church a quire of local tradesmen, farmers and labourers, their wives and daughters - singers and musicians - performed as much for their own satisfaction as that of the clergy and gentry below. The music in the parish tune books - which are our sources even today - was by turns exultant, lugubrious, ambitiously fugal and stoutly harmonised.

The Sunday Quire who during the week made up the Village Band or sang the traditional folk ballads and songs by home or hostelry fires gave it their hearty all: until the Ecclesiastical Correctness of the Victorians silenced the common tongue in favour of the music of organ, cassock and Hymns Ancient and Modern “and the old players played no more”.

Norfolk Gallery Quire presents the old hymns in a context of folk music and rural word painting to recapture some of the “ roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” of those days.

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