(Virtual) Prairie Voices - Ilus Ta Ei Ole

Winnipeg, CANADA - We LOVE a choir moment, so we were thrilled to find this submission from the Artistic Director and Conductor of choir Prairie Voices, Geung Kroeker-Lee. This piece was set to open a festival, which sadly had to be cancelled. The music is stirring and beautiful, and it’s a pretty great editing job too! This is one of those videos that you hope keeps being made even after we’re allowed to go outside!

From Geung Kroeker-Lee:

Ilus Ta Ei Ole’ is composed by Estonian composer Pärt Uusberg, poetry by Estonian poet Juhan Liiv, and is in Estonian. The title translates to “it is not beautiful” - the piece opens by listing off all things that seem ordinary about Estonia and then ends with the realization of how beautiful the country actually is. This, of course, can be taken literally but as an allegory to larger things in life. It is a beautiful text and musically stunning.

We were scheduled to perform this piece as the opening number at our March 14 concert which was cancelled due to concerns around COVID-19. That concert was also the 20th-anniversary concert for our organization. The piece was chosen because it described the journey of our organization, the beauty of choral singing and humanity - “ordinary“ people coming together to create music and beauty. And so we felt compelled to share this piece in some way and we chose to do that through our virtual choir video. Choral singing simply is not possible through virtual means; what this process helped us remember was that we cannot achieve this alone. But of course, it was a lot of fun to put it together.

I also want to mention that Ryan Mendoza and Kenji Dyck, both members of our choir were the experts in editing and mixing the audio and video.