Journey through a sea of possibilities

Can an amateur choir create an entire concert evening from "nothing"? The Basel choirs have taken up this challenge Culture and people and bâlcanto and the Youth choir ATempo! of the Basel music school improvising. The result of the long and sometimes arduous "journey" was an hour-long performance: it was touching and funny, but sometimes also left the audience somewhat perplexed.

According to the concept of project manager Johanna Schweizer, the three choirs received a "free pass" from the Gare du Nord and the Kunstmuseum Basel to perform in the exhibition. Basel Short Stories. From Erasmus to Iris von Roten to gather inspiration for a work to be developed. Three new pieces of music have been created in various stages, known as "looping journeys", since April 2018. This process required a great deal of courage, for example when swimming in the Rhine. Sännelä hojahoo had to sing.

The choir members were supported on these adventures by three cracks from the improvising music scene, vocal performers Christian Zehnder and Andreas Schaerer and singer Isa Wiss, who guided the choir members through an almost endless sea of sounds and creative possibilities. "For many of the participants, the improvisational freedom was a great challenge, in which some of them felt lost, especially at the beginning," explained Schweizer.

In addition, the choirs were to find a way to record the newly developed music on paper - an approach to graphic notation. The result turned out differently, however, as the evening was guided by video sequences by Paula Reissig, which calmly and cleverly set the beat and content - improvisation and structure were intended to complement each other, especially as there were no texts, which made it somewhat difficult for the audience to understand.
 

The themes chosen reflected the character of each choir in a striking way, allowing them to bring their strengths to the performance. The evening began with the Kultur und Volk choir, which performed to the movie Frick and tails improvised on the Basel ice skating duo Werner Groebli and Hansruedi Mauch. Fittingly, Christian Zehnder, who specializes in new alpine music, acted as coach.

Photo: Ute Schendel

Choir Culture and People with Christian Zehnder

Reissig's video showed less the capers of the figure skating heroes than the audience cheering them on. Coherent, revolving, sometimes somewhat lengthy sequences, which the choir accompanied with playful movements and sound fragments: Divided into three groups, they clapped, murmured and "sang" in rhythm. It was a sequence initiated by images that culminated in a yodelling song, the "Zuger".

The choice of the youth choir ATempo!, which, under the direction of Andreas Schaerer, explored the inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, proved somewhat more difficult. Lying vocal lines based on minimal music accompanied and accompanied video recordings showing abstract frequency curves or laboratory views with a spinning metal barrel. So there was little development, lengths were actually pre-programmed.

Photo: Ute Schendel

Andreas Schaerer and the youth choir ATempo! of the Basel Music School

To get in the mood for their project, the young people researched traffic noises on Wettsteinplatz or improvised to "intoxication and delirium" at Badischer Bahnhof. As a result, two young choristers said that they would now sing more courageously, "no matter what the others think". Together, the choir succeeded in setting the inner processes in motion, for example by passing each other crosswise with rising and falling vocal curves, with dissonances and consonances.

Under the direction of Isa Wiss, bâlcanto, an international choir, took the audience into a completely different world. It chose the civil-religious aspect of the 1912 Basel Peace Congress, an abstract theme for which photos were available, but no "moving images". Nevertheless, the performance became a successful "demonstration" thanks to a choreographed sequence of movements and the new video sequences.

Photo: Ute Schendel

bâlcanto

Out of nowhere, the actors trudged onto the podium, began to mumble quietly and then louder and louder, scraps of words such as "justice" or "people" whizzed through the air and in the hullabaloo, a woman began to croak loudly. A touching chorale developed in between. The piece ended with a bell improvisation, to which all the participants gradually took to the stage.

This was followed by a final improvisation, during which one slightly missed the video recordings that provided the framework. For the participants, however, this ending was probably particularly important, as one choir singer put it: "The coming together of the choirs! What an inter-generational project!"