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| Elisa Lago addressing the audience |
Today we - the Choir Cantalindo, conducted by my friend Elisa Lago - had our first live performance with a repertoire of five songs. Quite exciting for 11am on a Sunday morning. We were all a little nervous in the backroom, tuning our voices and wearing the same color green to show we’re a team. There were a lot of children in the audience, which is the toughest crowd, because kids can tell when you’re posing. The trick is to have a choirmaster that keeps not only the choir but also its recipients under control. So Elisa Lago’s hand circled in a gesture that gathered sky and earth and off we went. And that’s what I would like to reminisce about for a second. There’s something special about music teachers, isn’t there. It’s different with art teachers, for music seems to have an easier access to the soul. Because I still cherish my memories about my piano teacher Dominique, who in the 1990s decorated her clothes with smiley face brooches and was always searching for stubby pencils to underline the f’s and p’s on the music sheets. And when I think of my guitar teacher Gunther, he’s eternally singing Cat Steven’s Father and Son in our local music school. So today, while singing soprano in tune with the neighboring alto, I was struck by this splendid idea of how to save the art world from working alone and feeling lonely. We can’t go back to the happenings of the 1960s, but what about the choir?! - it’s a medium rather unexplored by artists (except in Iceland, where Magnús Pálsson founded in 2003 the Icelandic Sound Poetry Choir) and it has such a collaborative potential. I’m just saying... there was applause (art world, there was applause!) and we had waffles to celebrate (waffles, art world, waffles!).