Join Cambridge Timeline Choir for a very special performance of East Anglian folk music at St Barnabas Church, Mill Road, on Saturday 11 November from 7.30pm.
The Cambridgeshire fens provide the folkloric inspiration for much of the evening, but there will also be forays into Norfolk and Essex. Readings of poems, local sayings and letters, along with an atmospheric spectacle of historic photos projected onto the choir, will further bring the music and the history that inspired it to life. Thanks go to the Museum of Cambridge, whose valuable input has included providing photos and sources for local oral and written history, and to those choir members who have also provided testimonies and ideas.
Each of Choir Director Stef Conner’s brand new choral settings of local songs, ancient and modern, tells a unique story about the East of England. Songs chronicling land enclosure and the draining of the fens recall momentous events in our local history that forever changed the nature of the East Anglian landscape and the lives of fenland dwellers. Interwoven with these are traditional English folk songs on the themes of love, cautionary tales and nature, some of which were collected by John Clare, the early Nineteenth Century Cambridgeshire-born poet.
From beautiful, wistful songs of love and loss, to snippets of folk wisdom cautioning young women not to marry old men, and even a rousing sea shanty, the concert will take the audience on a sublime musical journey through our history. There will also be an opportunity for the audience to get directly involved and participate in the singing!
The Choir’s last concert on the theme of Shakespearean music was a sell-out, so make sure you buy your tickets in advance!