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Diversity of Voices – Choir concerts at the Humboldt Forum on 1 & 2 July 2023

27.06.2023
Humboldt Forum

At the beginning of July, the Humboldt Forum will be transformed into an oversized body of sound: for one weekend, the house will be ‘sung to’. For this purpose, 11 very different choirs from Berlin were invited and asked to explore the house and the collections, to be musically inspired by and to develop a short program from them. The results of these explorations will be presented by the choirs on July 1 and 2, distributed throughout the building: on the stairs, corridors and balconies, the laboratories and courtyards as well as in the exhibitions of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst on the 2nd and 3rd floors.

The JazzVocals will kick things off on Saturday, 1 July, at 2 pm in the exhibition area on religious architecture of the Northern Silk Road of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Room 315, 3rd floor). Against the backdrop of religious and artistic objects from the Tibetan plateau in the Himalayas, the approximately 30-strong choir will present jazz and pop interludes under the direction of Matthias Knoche. At the same time, the vocal ensemble Concentus Neukölln will perform a repertoire of so-called "old" music in the exhibition area "China and Europe - Art between War and Peace" (Room 320, 3rd floor), architecturally designed by Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu. In addition, on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. you can listen to the Diplomatic Choir of Berlin, for example, which will perform works of world music amidst impressive buildings from Oceania, including, amongst others, a traditional meeting house from Palau.

On Sunday, 2 July, for example, the Ayabás Women's Choir of Berlin, which combines decolonialist, feminist and intercultural themes in choral music, will sing at 2:30 pm in the Mesoamerica exhibition of the Ethnologisches Museum (room 207, 2nd floor). Surrounded by imposing stone stelae from Santa Lucía Cotzumalhuapa (Guatemala), the choir will perform Brazilian songs in Portuguese and in some of Brazil's many invisible indigenous languages.

The complete programme is available for download (PDF, 540 KB) on the Humboldt Forum website.