In 2005, Birmingham hosted the first complaint choir – since then, people have gathered in numerous locations, including Budapest, to transform their grievances into uplifting, creative energy within the framework of an artistic project.
It was a particularly cold winter morning, but the best ideas often come while walking in Helsinki. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen were completely absorbed in their conversation. The Finnish-German artist couple pondered the meaning of the word Valituskuoro, which means group complaint in Finnish. More specifically, it describes situations where multiple people complain at once.
The couple wondered how to transform the vast amount of wasted time and energy spent on complaining into something useful and valuable. Can a higher culture of complaining be created, where swearing and lamenting dissolve in the joy of togetherness? The couple viewed this challenge as an artistic project in which everyday grievances are transformed into an uplifting community experience. Thus, the idea of the complaint choir was born.
The concept is actually quite simple: invite the local population to complain in a selected city. Compile the collected complaints into the text of a choral piece, then set it to music with local musicians. Finally, perform the completed work: sing out the community's complaints and have fun while doing it.
The Birmingham Complaint Choir
All that was needed was an ideal venue for the realization. After much searching, the Birmingham Springhill Institute eventually hosted the project in 2005. The artists encouraged the local population through posters and flyers to send in their complaints. Numerous grievances arrived in response: from minor annoyances to complaints addressing global social issues, sometimes serious, sometimes humorous. Birmingham residents complained about slow computers, buses that rarely run early in the morning, overpriced beer, but also about fat women driving yellow sports cars, the giant billboard next to the town hall, and the incessant rain. The basic idea of the work was: I want my money back!
The Birmingham Complaint Choir was formed with a total of 18 members, the song was composed by a local musician, Mike Hurley, who also conducted and accompanied the choir on synthesizer. The completed choral piece quickly gained massive viewership on video-sharing platforms, and requests began pouring in from major cities around the world: the next three locations in 2006 were Helsinki, Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, and St. Petersburg. This was facilitated by the fact that the project became „open source” that year: the creators presented the process of founding a choir in 9 simple steps on the complaintchoire.org website and provided further useful information to assist local communities.
The Budapest Complaint Choir
Budapest was the 11th location in the series of complaint choirs. The organizers collected over 2000 complaints in just over a month. In the summer of 2007, the choir performed a song that used the melody of Gloomy Sunday as a framework, but was overall a cheerful and entertaining piece. The Hungarian complaints were quite varied. In addition to personal laments, national frustrations also appeared: why do they confuse Budapest with Bucharest, why do they call goulash what is actually stew abroad, why does the Hungarian national team never win? Funnier complaints also had their place: why do tourists think we tenderize meat under the saddle, why don't we have a space base, and why are we left out of corruption, but there were also complaints about a racist grandmother, inedible organic bulgur, and expensive free education.
One of the secrets to the success of complaint choirs is that complaining is a universal phenomenon. Every nation likes to complain in its own way. However, the manner of complaining is strongly culture-dependent: while in some cultural circles complaining has a negative connotation (I burden the other with my problems), in nations with a „developed culture of complaining,” the role of grievance takes on a different meaning: the lamenter is not seeking a solution to their complaints, but rather solidarity and understanding.
Since 2005, nearly two hundred complaint choirs have been formed, each one an independent artistic project. Although the collecting website that unites the complaint choirs has not been updated since early 2016, it seems that the demand for community complaining remains strong.
Have the complaint choirs achieved their original goals and made the world a better place? The answer certainly lies in all the ”complaint choir pieces,” which radiate the joy of togetherness. This joy can even be experienced in cold, windy Juneau, Alaska, where a choir of seven members demonstrated how grievance can be built into a cathedral amidst snowfall.
