My wife Tellervo and I came up with the idea to create a complaints choir during a winter day's walk. We were discussing complainers, and we realized that no matter what kind of circumstances people live in, no matter what kind of society and what quality of life, people will always complain and expend a lot of energy complaining. In the East they complained about the lack of choice, in the West about the abundance of choice. Even in Paradise people complained.

Would it be possible to transform just a tiny fraction of this energy? My wife is from Finland, and she remembered the old Finnish word "Valituskuoro," which means "Complaints Choir." An example of its use would be when a teacher gives a lot of homework and the students are upset and complaining about it, then the teacher would say "Oh, you're such a complaints choir." From that starting point, we decided it would be a good idea to take this concept of "Valituskuoro" literally and organize a real choir, with real people singing their complaints together.

Although the concept came quite spontaneously, we later realized that it had to do with the experiences we have had in the different countries we have lived in. I'm originally from East Germany. I lived there for nineteen years and then moved to West Germany i Hamburg i and lived there for ten years. Now I have been living in Finland for eight years. Of all the places I have lived in, Finland ranks highest in terms of education, least amount of corruption, et cetera, and yet I found that people here complain as much as in other places.

In 2005 the opportunity arose to put this concept into reality, when we received an invitation from the Springhill Institute in Birmingham, England (link: http://www.springhillinstitute.org/ [1]). Birmingham is known as an especially unattractive city full of architectural sins. Therefore we believed that it is an ideal place to organize the first complaints choir.

We arrived in town and immediately went to work, putting up flyers and posters in the streets, libraries, pubs, and supermarkets. We invited people to complain about anything they want and to sing their complains with others. People began calling and sending in their complaints ranging from one-liners to six A4 pages of text. People were a bit shy about the prospect of singing in a choir, some of them had not sang since their traumatic music lessons at school. But we had a strict "No Singing Skills required" policy with me as the prime example of a total unmusical person. We said: "It is not important at all, if you can sing or not; the only thing that matters is that you sing loud and with good attitude!"

It's very important to us that those doing the complaining are those that are doing also the singing; that way the complaints are not anonymous anymore, it is also the first step for the people to do something about their actual complaint.

Although nobody knew us in Birmingham, and we were there for only a very short period of time, we were still able to get 18 participants, which was enough people to form a choir. The first thing we did was to gather all the complaints and divided them into four different categories: complaints about Birmingham, complaints about the world, complaints about other people, and complaints about oneself. At the first "rehearsal" we had nothing else than a pile of paper with complaints. The choir was divided into small "expert groups", and each group worked on one of the categories, choosing the best complaints and re-wording them into a draft for the lyrics. A musician from Birmingham, Mike Hurley (link: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendi... [2] ), wrote the song within 3 days, so that we could already start practising at the next workshop meeting. Mike also conducted the choir and led the rehearsals. The song constantly evolved during the rehearsal as the choir gave its input, the best ideas came this way. It is very important to us that the people really feel that they own the song.

Soon after the Birmingham choir, we worked on a Helsinki choir, and then someone uploaded videos of both choirs onto the YouTube Web site [3]. YouTube decided to showcase one of those videos in its "Featured Videos" section, and that weekend I received over 600 e-mails. The interested generated by the video was enormous and widespread. For example one member of the Birmingham Choir was recognized at his local Farmers Market: "I have seen you on YouTube". Many people understood the idea instantly and wanted to set up a complaints choir in their own city. In response to this Tellervo and I then created a website (link: http://www.complaintschoir.org [4] ) where people could submit a documentation of their choir. The project developed its own dynamic, and that was exciting to us as artists because of the broad audience that we had connected with. You get very seldom such a massive feedback for your artwork, if any at all. It is really a new experience that someone we never have met or talked to just writes a long and insightful article about the project. (link: http://www.amateurmusicians.net/?p=33 [5]

Looking at the complaints choirs from different cities, no country stands out as being more of a complainer than any other, but the quality of the complaints differs from nation to nation. In Germany the complaints were hard and a touch aggressive, so the choir became somewhat of a protest. In Finland the complaints were more humorous, leading to a lighter, wittier choir. In St. Petersburg the complaints were very existential, mainly about love, that is unfulfilled love. It felt also a very typical Russian feature that the complaining doesn't start immediately, when you look the video you will hear the first complaints after a long 1 1/2 minute poetic introduction addressing the audience. In Helsinki complaining starts right away without foreplay. In Birmingham the project had a party-like feel to it, still it was the city with most complaints about the people themselves.

In the near future we will learn about complainers in the United States and Southeast Asia, as we will be going to Chicago in September to start a complaints choir there, and to Singapore next year. We are also curious to go to India as it is supposed to be a very famous complaints culture; it would be interesting to work with a choir there. Argentina is a special case too, there people complain like everywhere else, but people always know a solution to their complaints, the only thing they would need is a bit more power. ("If I were President everything would be fine...") If we go to Argentina we will have two choirs: a complaints and a solution choir. Somebody suggested to us to go to Kosovo, but our friend who lives in Prishtina told us, that the concept wouldn't work there: people have only 1 complaint; they want independence, everything else is of no concern. That would become a short piece of music. We were also surprised when people told us that in most African nations people do not complain at all, as it is not part of their culture, even though they should have most reason to complain. But I am not sure if that is really true, we should find it out.

Besides initiating a few more choirs ourselves we will maintain the website and encourage people to organize their own choirs. Complaints choirs have crossed the Atlantic and begun popping up across North America, from Alaska to Toronto to Pittsburgh. There are also some special interest complaints choirs emerging: the Debian Choir of Complaint and the International Autistic Complaints Choir.

Do you have some complaints you want to share with everyone? Start your own complaints choir.

Find out how [6] or Link to our personal site [7]