Thursday 2 December 2010

A Viral Chorus




Sent to me on Facebook by Jim Lindop. Flash mobs here and flash mobs there, but this is moving and lovely.



4 comments:

Gwil W said...

It's lovely when something like that happens. Thanks for sharing.

Alfred Corn said...

A reminder that there is unmistakably something divine about daily, unremarkable folk. I wish the piece hadn't concluded with the raised-arms gesture, an earmark of Evangelicals, whose ideology has indeed run through American society like the flu, just as the single raised arm swept through Germany in the 1930s.

George S said...

I hadn't associated the raised arms with Evangelicals, Alfred, but then I don't have that much knowledge of Evangelical services. People often raise their arms in joy and, given it is the Hallelujah chorus, I took it to be such an expression of formalised joy, somewhat (necessarily) choreographed to signal the end of the performance.

The singers were not ordinary folk, of course, they were a choir working as a flash mob. Flash mobs infiltrate a public place looking exactly like ordinary folk then set about their business of dancing or singing or performing a piece from a musical or opera - in one case engaging in a huge pillow fight at, possibly, Liverpool Street station. I can't remember the details. There is a considerable collection of such flash events on YouTube. They look impromptu but are fully planned and, as you can imagine, have to be.

I expect you know all this. But in any case this wasn't an outbreak of unbridled, if musically pleasing, religious mania, but an impromptu brief concert in an unexpected place.

Gwil W said...

Merry Christmas is the message of in the video. To connect the raising of one's arms in joy in the supposed direction of heaven with the last notes of the Halleluja Chorus to the stiff fascist salutes of Hitler's Nazis is I think a little ridiculous.

ps- I have NO religion, and no bloodstained axe to grind.