Finland’s Shouting Men’s Choir

Posted by Mike Richard on January 21, 2008
Filed under: Finland, Music, Sidelines

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The northern Finnish town of Oulu has been described as ‘Just like Geelong, but colder and with more fish.’ It is home to, among other things, the World Air Guitar Championship.

It is also the birthplace of the Shouting Men’s Choir: thirty men in black suits, yelling.

Finland’s Shouting Men’s Choir

Finns, by and large, are quiet people. Silence doesn’t have the awkward associations that it does in much of the Western world - if Finns are quiet, it’s because they’re comfortable that way. This choir was, in part, as a reaction against that tradition of silence.

The initial advert simply asked for men who wanted to scream. Hundreds of men have “sung” since then, including a lot of national anthems. This includes the Shouting Men’s Choir version of Marseillaise.

Oulu is like a lot of isolated northern towns the world over: infused with an anarchist spirit and an odd sense of humour. The choir once hopped on a bus, drove seven hundred kilometers to the ice sea between Norway and Finland, and yelled into the barren, empty wind. They then got back on the bus, and drove home.

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This post was reprinted with permission of the author.



Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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