For the past twenty years, Vox Populi Mixed Choir has established itself as a distinguished concert choir, performing numerous high-level concerts both in Estonia and abroad, winning international competitions, premiering new works, performing major choral compositions, and creating staged concert productions that have reached audiences as far away as the United States and Japan. Through many of these performances, the choir has contributed to preserving and promoting the languages and spiritual heritage of Finno-Ugric peoples.

Between 2016 and 2020, Vox Populi collaborated with the Estonian Association of Music Teachers and musicologist Tiia Järgi to present lecture-concerts in dozens of schools throughout Estonia. The anniversary performance also takes the form of a lecture-concert, offering audiences an overview of the choir’s most significant achievements while showcasing key works from the past decade by composers including Arvo Pärt, Mart Saar, Heinrich Schütz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pärt Uusberg, Urmas Sisask, Eric Whitacre, and Veljo Tormis.

Anne Türnpu on the Concert Production

THE CONFERENCE OF BIRDS
A Symposium for Mixed Choir, Ornithologist, and Birds
TODAY, A THOUSAND YEARS AGO
VOX POPULI XX

This unique concert performance combines choral music, scientific ornithology, and the sounds of living nature.

Ornithologists have discovered a remarkable anomaly: the vocal language of Estonia’s songbirds appears to have regressed by approximately one thousand years. Normally, birdsong reflects elements of the surrounding environment, including artificial sounds and the speech melodies of the human population. Yet an unnoticed shift has occurred in what the birds are mirroring.

The only plausible explanation seems to be Vox Populi’s frequent outdoor performances of the music of Veljo Tormis. The foundation of Tormis’s compositional language lies in the ancient Baltic-Finnic runic song tradition, which is itself estimated to be between 1,000 and 1,200 years old. As a result, the birds have begun to sing in the rhythm and structure of runic song.

In this scenario, choral music is not merely a background element to be reflected by nature. Rather, it has “infected” the birds, acting as a catalyst that awakens an ancient language. Tormis took the archaic human speech of his time, embodied in runic song, and transformed it into choral music. The birds, having absorbed this language from their environment through the choir’s ritualistic concert productions, have begun reflecting it back once again.

The circle has closed.

Congratulations, Vox Populi!