A Singing revolution in Catalonia?

With a pop­u­la­tion just below that of Barcelona, at around 1.5m in­hab­i­tants, Es­to­nia is one of the EU’s less in­hab­ited coun­tries. Fur­ther­more, to­gether with its two south­ern Baltic neigh­bours, Lithua­nia and Latvia, it lags in pop­u­la­tion den­sity; para­dox­i­cally enough, con­sid­er­ing the fer­tile (mostly flat) land that faces the Baltic sea. To­gether with a re­cent his­tory of strug­gle for na­tional self-de­ter­mi­na­tion, the three coun­tries share an ex­cep­tional en­trenched cul­ture of choral music: one of the high­lights while vis­it­ing their main cities are the huge open-air au­di­to­ri­ums, such as those in Vil­nius, Riga and Tallinn. They host the coun­tries’ main song fes­ti­vals, in which choirs gather every once in a while to play and sing mostly pagan songs.

After nar­rowly miss­ing the pre­vi­ous one in 2014, this au­thor at­tended Es­to­nia’s main song fes­ti­val, “Laulupidu”, last July. The event’s cli­matic day, al­ways on a sum­mer Sun­day, was a heart-warm­ing dis­play of colour­ful choirs (dressed in tra­di­tional cos­tumes) com­ing from the four cor­ners of the coun­try, in a whole-hearted com­mu­nion with a burst­ing au­di­to­rium: peo­ple of all ages, happy and proud of their long-liv­ing tra­di­tions, able to stand up and sing in tune for hours. Be­yond the stun­ning har­monies and melodies, the event is a dis­play of the na­tion’s iden­tity, an at­mos­phere that raises a keen­ness to join the crowd; and, why not, jeal­ousy (the rea­son­able one) of this coun­try’s gen­uine el­e­gance and unity.

The doc­u­men­tary “The Singing Rev­o­lu­tion” (2007) de­scribed events in Es­to­nia (which took a sim­i­lar path in Latvia and Lithua­nia) dur­ing its strug­gle against the So­viet Union, pre­cisely via the lenses of this pow­er­ful singing tra­di­tion. It was by singing their own music in their own lan­guage (de facto for­bid­den by Moscow) that Es­to­ni­ans con­nected with their past, over­lap­ping Com­mu­nist rule. Singing tra­di­tional music in Es­ton­ian was a way of chan­nelling their na­tion’s as­pi­ra­tions, as well as (in­di­rectly) call­ing the So­viet op­pres­sors by name. In fact, it was a slap in the face of the So­viet Union’s staged har­mony, and it slowly pushed Es­ton­ian’s po­lit­i­cal main­stream to­wards the path of self-de­ter­mi­na­tion. Ar­guably, Es­to­nia’s cun­ning politi­cians where skil­ful to take ad­van­tage of Gor­ba­chov’s “Glas­nost” (open­ness) and “Per­e­stroika” (re­form), both key in caus­ing the So­viet Union’s nat­ural im­pulses to crash what­ever de­vi­ated from the Nomen­klatura’s dic­tates.

Cat­alo­nia is nowa­days praised world­wide for claim­ing in­de­pen­dence through mas­sive peace­ful ral­lies, as we have seen re­cently. The par­tic­i­pa­tive, de­mo­c­ra­tic and open at­ti­tude is such here that agent provo­ca­teurs (there are roughly 200 Span­ish in­tel­li­gence of­fi­cers ded­i­cated to de­rail­ing the Cata­lan move­ment) have no place for the tricks seen else­where. Yet, among the beauty of the ral­lies them­selves, some of them chore­o­graphed, it re­mains to be seen to what level they could be el­e­vated with big choirs singing along. Bring­ing in mas­sive choirs would fur­ther con­trast with Madrid’s re­pres­sion, adding more adepts to the Cata­lan fight for self-de­ter­mi­na­tion, be they local or in­ter­na­tional.

While unity and broth­er­hood are ev­i­dently dis­played by the cheer­ful crowds them­selves, the evoca­tive­ness of music stands at an­other level, as Baltic choral tra­di­tions show. Lat­vian writer and politi­cian Otto Ozols writes that Cat­alo­nia has a unique set of civil so­ci­ety in­sti­tu­tions, raised from the bot­tom up, from a di­ver­sity of sec­tors and mi­lieus, among which there is a long tra­di­tion of choral music. With lead­er­ship and col­lec­tive mo­ti­va­tion, it may be pos­si­ble to ma­te­ri­alise this po­ten­tial, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing that the Cata­lan mu­si­cal reper­toire in­cludes melodies and songs per­fectly suited to large au­di­ences, such as the ones de­scribed above.