Dumfries Radicals Performance

The concert on 30 August at Dumfries Museum is the result of a collaboration between the Dumfries Museum; the Dumfries Radicals, a choir made up largely of members of Cairn Chorus (a community choir based in Moniaive); and Paul Guppy, a close friend of choir members who runs a West Gallery choir in Lancaster. The choir was created to record the video used in the museum exhibition video, singing two pieces of music from the Chartist movement under Paul’s excellent guidance.
The choir will sing six pieces, all researched and set to music by Paul. In some cases, they are his own compositions, in others he has paired texts with songs from the period. All six pieces are associated with working class movements of the 19th century, and all have Scottish connections, either in the words or the melodies. One piece – ‘Fearful Anticipations on the Onset of Winter’ – is a musical setting by Paul of words by Roger Quin of Dumfries, who features in the exhibition.
Paul’s impressive achievement in putting all this together stems from concerts conceived and performed in 2019 for the bicentenary of the Peterloo massacre of 1819. This concert was very well received and encouraged him to produce a book of choir settings of the Chartist Hymn Book, a collection of 14 texts published during the active period of Chartism in the 1830s and 40s. The pieces recorded for the exhibition are from this book, and the concert will feature these along with four other gems unearthed by Paul.
The songs embrace a range of emotions from poignant to rousing, from quiet hymns to revolutionary anthems, all with a determined passion to improve the conditions of working people in the face of tyranny and indifference.
As well as the choir performance, Paul will give a short talk on the role of music in the Chartist movement, and there will be a further talk by Ian Gass, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of worker movements in Dumfries which informs the museum exhibition.