In 2006 we participated in a singing workshop led by John Kirkpatrick. The event fell just before Christmas and therefore it was natural that the workshop should include carols from the Sheffield tradition. We had been promised rich and stirring folk harmonies and we were not disappointed! For weeks afterwards we kept bumping into enthusiastic people who had been at the workshop. The burden of the ensuing conversations always seemed to be: “why don’t we have a choir to sing that sort of music round here?’’
So, we formed, what was initially called, The Cwmbach Quire!
We found the WGMA website. Mike Bailey sent us a West Gallery starter pack of three psalm settings: ‘As Pants the Hart’, ‘Giberalter’ and ‘Burton Bradstock’. Our singers – friends, neighbours and those from the wider community who had been at the aforementioned workshop – had
varying degrees of musical experience but lots of enthusiasm and we made rapid progress. Our first concert appearance was five months after the John Kirkpatrick workshop and only 11 weeks after our first rehearsal!
Various changes have taken place over the last three years – including a change of name to The Village Quire – but the essential values of the group have remained fairly constant. We have determined that our core repertoire will be West Gallery music but with forays into other related styles of folk polyphony from time to time. We began singing without instrumental accompaniment for want of players of appropriate instruments; we continue without instruments because we have come to like it that way. We have determined to remain a small group – three-to-a-part – so that individual voices are not swallowed whole in a ‘sea of sound’. We do not sing in eighteenth century costume. Our performances often include readings intended to set the music in a social and historical context for those who are unfamiliar with the genre.
Our concerts are typically for church and chapel fundraising events; benefits for charities such as Action Aid (South Indian street children), Wales Air Ambulance, Parkinson’s Disease, Macmillan Nurses; village feast days; beer festivals; folk clubs ... and one reception for the Archbishop of Canterbury!