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Spring Timeline Choir rehearsals resume on Tuesday 15th (Surrey) and Thursday 17th (Cambridge) January. As always, new members are most welcome to come and join us for the new term. This season sees kicks off our righteously harmonious programme ‘Melodic Dissent’, celebrating music as a powerful weapon in the perennial fight against cruelty and injustice, from as early as the Middle Ages and including folk songs from the fens, love songs to trees from Sussex and songs of protest against land enclosure by the poet John Clare.

Timeline Choir is a community singing group with a difference: although it is open to all, with no auditions and no requirement for members to be able to read music, the choir is set apart by its specially-arranged and artistically ambitious repertoire, which celebrates the heritage of the local area, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.

Cambridge Timeline Choir begins with an open session on Thursday 17th January, 7:30pm, at the St. Barnabas Centre on Mill Road. If you love to sing then come along and try out some beautiful old music… arranged in new ways! You can email Stef to sign up (Cambridge only)  or read more here.

Leith Hill Timeline Choir resumes with an open session on Tuesday 15th January, 7:30pm, at Forest Green Village Hall, Forest Green, Surrey. If you love to sing then come along and try out some beautiful old music… arranged in new ways! You can email Claire to sign up or read more here.

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Cambridge Timeline Choir will sing carols in the courtyard at Wimpole Estate as part of their Christmas celebrations on Sunday 2nd December. The singing runs from 2pm ’til 2:30pm and features light-hearted English carols and folksongs with a sprinkling of Christmas cheer! The event is free to attend and open to all.

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All are welcome to an evening of traditional songs and festive carols from the southern counties, with Leith Hill Timeline Choir, on Saturday 24th November, 7:30pm, in Rusper Church. Sussex was at the forefront of the English Folk revival of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Alongside their more famous peers Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, the choir celebrate the names Burstow, Belloc and Broadwood: a shoemaker and bell ringer, an Anglo-French writer, historian and enthusiastic drinker of Sussex beer, and the daughter of a famous family of piano manufacturers, who was, more importantly, one of history’s greatest champions of English traditional music.

Henry Burstow boasted a vast repertoire of 420 songs, some of which he passed onto Broadwood for her first volume English Country Songs, published in 1893, as well as contributing to the folk-song collections of Vaughan Williams. Hilaire Belloc was one of the most prolific writers of early 20th century England. He spent most of his life in West Sussex, loving the county to the point of idolatry, and writing several works about the area. He loved Sussex songs (particularly the ones about drinking) and wrote about singing as if it were the soul of Sussex. Lucy Broadwood, the unsung heroine of the English folksong, bridged the divide between traditional and art music. Eschewing the conventional harmonies of the Victorian drawing-room ballad, she was instead drawn to the stunning simplicity of the folk song, believing them to possess “perhaps the most beautiful, original and varied cadences to be found in music”. She is buried here in Rusper Church. Interwoven with songs collected, written and sung by these three Sussex greats will be some favourite Christmas carols, lending a seasonal slant to the timeless themes of love, loss and compassion, which have been at the heart of the English folksong since time immemorial. There will be one or two opportunities to sing along!

Tickets cost £12, including a glass of wine, and are available to reserve by calling either Maggie (01293 851906) or Louise (01293 871600)

Leith Hill Timeline Choir is proud to present Southern County Songs in association with Rusper Church’s Belloc, Broadway and Beyond project: www.rusperchurch.org.uk/belloc-broadwood-and-beyond

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Autumn Timeline Choir rehearsals resume on Tuesday 18th (Surrey) and Thursday 27th (Cambridge) September. As always, new members are most welcome to come and join us for the new term. This autumn and winter season sees a focus on medieval and renaissance Christmas songs in Cambridge, festive folk songs collected by Lucy Broadwood in Surrey and a look into our 2019 programme ‘Melodic Dissent’, celebrating music as a powerful weapon in the perennial fight against cruelty and injustice, from as early as the Middle Ages and including folk songs from the fens, love songs to trees from Sussex and songs of protest against land enclosure by the poet John Clare.

Timeline Choir is a community singing group with a difference: although it is open to all, with no auditions and no requirement for members to be able to read music, the choir is set apart by its specially-arranged and artistically ambitious repertoire, which celebrates the heritage of the local area, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.

Cambridge Timeline Choir begins with an open session on Thursday 27th September, 7:30pm, at the St. Barnabas Centre on Mill Road. If you love to sing then come along and try out some beautiful old music… arranged in new ways! You can email Stef to sign up (Cambridge only)  or read more here.

Leith Hill Timeline Choir resumes with an open session on Tuesday 18th September, 7:30pm, at Forest Green Village Hall, Forest Green, Surrey. If you love to sing then come along and try out some beautiful old music… arranged in new ways! You can email Stef to sign up or read more here.

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NOTE: Online bookings for this event are now closed, but there are plenty of tickets available on the door. Please come for 7:00pm to be sure of getting a ticket.

Join Cambridge Timeline Choir for their third annual concert, a celebration of the joys of musical riddling… from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day…

From musical conundrums that must be solved to be sung to tales of witty characters riddling their way out of trouble, – or into a lover’s bed! – Cambridge Timeline Choir take on the full spectrum of riddles in song, in a vocal pageant of puzzles at Emmanuel United Reformed Church on Saturday 14th July. The widespread, perhaps even universal, art of riddling has been a part of human culture for at least as long as writing can attest, and this concert celebrates the way in which the ingenious practice has enriched intellectual and musical life in the British Isles. Tracing the tradition back to the riddles and kennings of the Anglo-Saxon world, the programme meanders into the mysteries of the Middle English lyric and embraces the challenge of the renaissance musical enigma, before pursuing the twisting and turning narratives of English folk ballads all the way to the present day. The choir mingle the medieval and modern, singing new works by composers Kerry Andrew, Iain Russell and Timeline Choir conductor Stef Conner alongside pieces by Thomas Morley, Richard Sampson and John Dunstable, as well as several centuries of beautiful traditional songs, collected and preserved by the local poet John Clare and composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, among others. Favourites like Scarborough Fair and I Gave my Love a Cherry can be heard alongside lesser-known songs like the Maid of Ocram and Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship. All are welcome to come and be both perplexed and delighted by this feast of musical mystery.

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New Year Timeline Choir rehearsals resume on Tuesday 9th (Surrey) and Thursday 11th (Cambridge) January. As always, new members are most welcome to come and join us for the new term. This spring sees a focus on medieval, renaissance, traditional and even a bit of modern music based on riddles and games as this year we will be exploring the surprising history of the musical puzzle, including songs based on riddles and pieces of music in which the notes themselves are the riddle, including the use of composers names in music (B-A-C-H for example) and musical scores that form special shapes and conceal hidden messages.

Timeline Choir is a community singing group with a difference: although it is open to all, with no auditions and no requirement for members to be able to read music, the choir is set apart by its specially-arranged and artistically ambitious repertoire, which celebrates the heritage of the local area, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.

Cambridge Timeline Choir begins with an open session on Thursday 11th January, 7:30pm, at the St. Barnabas Centre on Mill Road. If you love to sing then come along and try out some beautiful old music… arranged in new ways! You can email Meg to sign up (Cambridge only)  or read more here.

Leith Hill Timeline Choir resumes with an open session on Tuesday 9th January, 7:30pm, at The Punchbowl Inn, Okewood Hill, Surrey. If you love to sing then come along and try out some beautiful old music… arranged in new ways! You can email Stef to sign up or read more here.

Beat the Winter Blues by taking up singing this New Year!

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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.

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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!

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Following a long summer holiday, Timeline Choir rehearsals resume on Tuesday 19th (Surrey) and Thursday 21st September (Cambridge). As always, new members are most welcome to come and join us for the new term. This autumn sees a focus on traditional music from each of the two choir’s local areas, with some beautiful new arrangements of much-loved English songs.

Timeline Choir is a community singing group with a difference: although it is open to all, with no auditions and no requirement for members to be able to read music, the choir is set apart by its specially-arranged and artistically ambitious repertoire, which celebrates the heritage of the local area, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day.

Cambridge Timeline Choir begins with an open session on Thursday 21st September, 7:30pm, at the St. Barnabas Centre on Mill Road. If you love to sing then come along and try out some new arrangements of folk songs collected in the East of England. You can email Meg to sign up or read more here.

Leith Hill Timeline Choir resumes with an open session on Tuesday 19th September, 7:30pm, at Forest Green Village Hall, Forest Green, Surrey. If you love to sing then come along and try out some new arrangements of folk songs collected by Dorking’s much-loved composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. You can email Stef to sign up or read more here.

Take up singing this September!

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Timeline Choir will host a summer singalong on Sunday 27th August at Leith Hill Place, Surrey. Join singers from Leith Hill Timeline Choir and directors Stef Conner and Claire Robinson for an informal afternoon of favourite British songs, from Britten to the Beatles, including plenty of Vaughan Williams!
As well as a mixture of solo and small ensemble songs from the choir, there will be opportunities for the audience to learn a few harmonies and join in with some much-loved folk songs.
Singing sessions will take place at 2pm and 3pm for visitors to Vaughan Williams’ childhood home, who are invited to bring pic nicks and enjoy the music on the beautiful lawn overlooking the Surrey Hills. The performance is free with entry to the house.

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Pretend there’s no election – come and sing sea shanties!

Join Stef Conner, Meg Thomas and Cambridge Timeline Choir for a raucous evening of sea shanty singing, featuring songs from the East of England. All low voices (tenors, basses, contraltos and husky altos) are welcome – no sight-reading ability or singing experience are required. Just be prepared to make noise and have fun! Oh, did we mention that it’s completely free?

Thursday 8th June

7:30pm–9:30pm
The old school hall, st barnabas centre, cambridge CB1 2bd

MAP

Book your place

The workshop is free to attend, but we can plan better if we know who’s coming, so please email Meg to book your place: JOIN US!