Complaints Choir of the World

Share Your Global Gripes in Song

Let's face it: we all love to complain. It's too cold out; it's too hot out. I'm too tired; I can't fall asleep. What if you had the chance to get together with a group of people and write all your complaints down? What if you could sing out your complaints as part of an impromptu choir? You might have the opportunity: a complaints choir might be coming to a city near you.

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.

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. 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.

The First Complaints Choir In 2005 the opportunity arose to put this concept into reality, when we received an invitation from the Springhill Institute in Birmingham, England. 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 were a bit shy about the prospect of singing in a choir, but we had a strict "No Singing Skills required" policy. 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.

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, wrote the song within 3 days, so that we could already start practising at the next workshop meeting.

Complaints Choir Worldwide

Soon after the Birmingham choir, we worked on a Helsinki choir, and then someone uploaded videos of both choirs onto YouTube. 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.

In response to this Tellervo and I then created a Complaints Choir website 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.

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