Norfolk Gallery Quire

exists to revive the lively music that was used in Norfolk village churches in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Norfolk Gallery Quire at Wymondham Festival. photo © Rosie Gutteridge

Download sheet music
Pictures of the Quire
Reviews of Quire concerts
The Fall of Eve Village Band
The Minister's Vision
Elizabeth Gutteridge
Chris Gutteridge
Richard Blake
Wyldes Noyse

Want to know more about West Gallery Music? email to discuss holding a workshop with your choir.

Norfolk Gallery Quire concerts & services

CD, Norfolk Gallery Quire
live at Walpole Old Chapel

Saturday 25th May Church Tour - Norfolk Gallery Quire and friends from other quires visit and sing in local churches: St Bartholomew Brisley, St Mary the Virgin Beeston,St Mary Titleshall & St Andrew East Lexham.

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.

This website uses cookies