About The Kilbarchan Singers

The Kilbarchan Singers is a chamber choir based in Kilbarchan Renfrewshire. The Choir sings mostly a cappella music. We have about about 20 members and perform concerts in December and May. Whenever possible, we also organise concerts for charity. The choir performs a wide range of music, from individual pieces to larger scale choral works.

We sing in a variety of styles from early music to the 21st century, classical to folk, madrigals to contemporary works from around the world. Our repertoire includes music from Bach to the Beatles, Robert Burns, to James MacMillan, Simon and Garfunkel and Queen to Eric Whittaker.

The Kilbarchan Singers were founded by Ian and Joyce McCallum in 1982. It was originally a madrigal group with 12 members and rehearsed and held concerts in The Steeple Hall in Kilbarchan. As the choir and audience numbers expanded we moved to rehearsing in the Kilbarchan East Church and held our Christmas concert in the Kilbarchan West Church. We are now fortunate to rehearse in The Kilbarchan Church Hall and perform in Kilbarchan Parish Church.Ian retired as Musical Director in 2006 and the Kilbarchan Singers have built on the strong foundations he gave us. These include our love of music, our enjoyment of singing together and maintaining high performance standards. For this we owe Ian a huge debt of gratitude. Since then, each Musical Director has brought something new to the Singers and continued to build on Ian’s legacy.

History of The Kilbarchan Singers

During our forty plus years, we have sung in a variety of local venues including Paisley Abbey, Pollok House, Glasgow Cathedral, Kelvingrove Museum, and Holy Trinity and St. Barnabas Church, Paisley. For many years the Choir sang as part of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ Hospice’s “Light Up a Life” Service in St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Glasgow until the Hospice moved their premises to Bellahouston.

The Singers have been fortunate to be able to travel further afield to sing in some iconic venues. With Ian as our conductor, we have sung in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. Our 20th anniversary, in 2002, saw us visiting Freiburg, Germany and singing in the Munster. A highlight was singing in Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris in 2004, and also St. Michael’s and St Gudula’s Cathedral in Brussels, Belgium in 2007.

In 2012, the choir celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, by producing our own CD - "My Spirit Sang All Day", conducted by James Slimings, and recorded at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. If you would like to listen to some of the tracks from our CD please click on Video section at the top of the home page.

For our 35th anniversary in 2017 we sang in Dunfermline Abbey. As Covid 19 struck we decided to continue rehearsing via Zoom with our then Musical Director, Rebecca Murphy. So with the help of Rebecca, our Zoom rehearsals and our choir What’s App group we were able to come out of that difficult time and continue with our love of music. With our new musical director, Joshua Stutter we were able to celebrate our 40th anniversary with family and friends in a concert in Kilbarchan where it all began.

The Choir is continuing our musical journey with Alastair Robertson, our Musical Director

The Kilbarchan Singers wish to sincerely thank Renfrewshire Council who have, over the years, very generously awarded us grants to enable us to appoint two Music Scholars who bring their musical talents to The Singers and therefore enhance our rehearsals and performances. In return, it enables them to develop their musical skills even further by singing in a choir setting and by taking on solo performances.