Static, the Master Wand, and very large choirs

The largest regularly scheduled choral singing event in the world is the Estonian National Song Festival, or Laulupidu, which comes around about once every five years in Tallinn, Estonia's capital city. The numbers are pretty mind blowing.

- BY MICHAEL TREI

Two all-day concerts are held over a weekend in early July, and this year, at its peak, the number of singers on stage at one time reached 32,022, performing to an audience of 100,000. Pretty amazing for a small country of just 1.4 million people. This is truly Choral Woodstock. I wrote about my first trip to the 1985 Laulupidu in Spin Doctor #9,¹ which took place in what at the time was occupied Soviet Estonia. Since then, I have attended four more times.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of singing in Estonian culture. The 1991 revolution that brought Estonia its independence from Soviet occupation is commonly known as the Singing Revolution due to the use of song as a form of protest. Almost every town, village, school, and social club in the country has its own choir. The 990 choirs that participated in this year's festival had to audition to be selected: If your choir doesn't meet the standards of the selection committee, you'll be watching from the audience. As in the last festival in 2019, my sister Lisa and one of her daughters were in choirs that passed muster and were able to participate.

It's hard to describe the sound produced by 32,000 well-trained singers going full tilt. Surprisingly, it's not about volume. Because Laulupidu is held in a bowl-like outdoor setting, when I pulled up an app to measure the sound pressure level from my position about 300' behind the conductor, it was reaching peaks of