The choir was founded in the late 1980s. It all started with surprise performances for unsuspecting audiences anywhere in the Oulu region: streets, community events, spectacular nature spots… Now Huutajat has become one of the most popular ambassadors of Finnish art. The choir feels equally at home in prestigious music festivals, museums of contemporary art, country fairs and underground clubs.

Petri Sirviö is the founder, composer and conductor of the group. Sometimes when the choir is out of reach or resting, he sets up installations with videos, transcriptions and audio devices.

The idea had been around for some time in Oulu: to form a choir of screaming men. In October 1987, a group of men in their 20s started to make it real.

On December 6th, a 17-member choir delivered an unprecedented performance in a student house in Oulu. This first performance of Huutajat delighted, baffled and terrified the audience. Something new had emerged in the world.

Huutajat doubled in size in a few weeks. The repertoire grew rapidly. The choir performed frequently and without warning, and the media tried to follow. This was 20 years before flash mobs: Huutajat was boldly breaking new ground. In November 1988, the choir travelled to Helsinki. In addition to highly successful gigs, the trip included a live TV performance for the Finnish national broadcasting company YLE.

In a year, Huutajat had become locally and nationally known. Next the choir hit the neighbouring countries. In May 1989, Huutajat headed to Leningrad, where they gatecrashed an electoral event with the militia swarming around them.

This first trip abroad was followed by a tour to the Finnish Lapland and Northern Norway in autumn 1989. In Norway, Huutajat had the largest and emptiest audience so far, when the choir performed for the Arctic Ocean.

In 1990, Huutajat travelled to Leningrad again, this time with the Russian avant-garde group Avia. All corners of  Finland were visited little by little. In the early 1990s, the choir launched three long European tours by bus, visiting Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and Estonia. The choir was particularly popular in the Netherlands. In the early years, rock clubs and festivals provided the most natural context for Huutajat. Rockwise, the 1994 gig on the Roskilde Festival main stage was arguably the high point.

From the world of rock, the choir’s reputation spread fast – first to other music genres, then to events of surprisingly many art forms. The 1995 performance at the Wiener Festwochen was the first big international event outside the choir’s comfort zone. Since then, Huutajat has performed in such events and venues as Ars Electronica in Linz, Meltdown Festival in the Royal Festival Hall, Salzburger Festspiele, Musee D’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Venice Biennale, Kölner Philharmonie and MoMA.

By 2014, Huutajat has performed in 25 countries on three continents. The choir’s repertoire has expanded from the initial patriotic songs to dozens of pieces. Tours abroad created the need for Sirviö to compose the texts of several national hymns and most famous children’s ditties.

Today the repertoire includes e.g. workers’ songs, oral and written poetry, reggae, Christmas songs and comics. Factual texts are as suitable for the choir: quotes from Finnish laws, ethnological presentations, international treaties, municipal plans, the U.S. constitution and the Bible.

The choir’s interest in surprising and forgotten sites has persisted through the years. The 10th anniversary concert of Huutajat took place in an abandoned mill in Oulu on December 6th, 1997. The 15th anniversary celebrations started at a community hall in the neighbouring municipality of Muhos and ended up in the Kiasma Theatre in Helsinki. The setting of the 25th anniversary concert was the pearl of 1960s concrete brutalism: the Pohjankartano School in Oulu. The event gathered half of the 170 men that at some point have been choir members. The anniversary year continued as a communal celebration that transcended boundaries between arts. On the Hailuoto island, Huutajat shouted with children.

In connection with Sirviö’s exhibition of video installations at the Oulu Museum of Art, the choir shouted at visitors, especially mothers. At Folkoperan in Stockholm, voices were produced for Margrét Sara Gudjónsdóttir’s minimalist choreography. In Narvik, Huutajat could feel the power of the winter sea again. In Warsaw, the choir performed for a more lively urban culture. Workshops attracted people to try the art of shouting. Huutajat were pleased to welcome a large number of shouter candidates to start the rigorous training to become full-fledged members of the choir. The anniversary year was closed appropriately at Tampere-talo with a sold-out concert of 70 screaming men, videos and cryptic stories.

A screaming men’s choir provides an appropriate context to contemplate many kinds of things, especially the relationship between individual and community. Can spontaneous private emotions be expressed through an authoritarian community? Does a community have a mind of its own? Does it have an age? Are stereotypes accurate generalisations or just goofy caricatures? Where is the line between forcing and persuasion? Which is the more important factor, the law of a community or the need to belong to a community?

I work one night a week with my screaming friends. Most of the time I work alone in silence. I start a choral work from the text. Sometimes the original drive of a text provides the starting point, sometimes the vocal sound of words or syllables. Often the hidden meanings are the most interesting thing. I love working with the choir, as it is my only work community and an endless source of energy and joviality. Besides, the choir members have become excellent performers during the years.

Choral works are, however, not enough to satisfy my artistic curiosity. Many ideas are better realised as video works or conceptual installations. I work mostly on commission: I’m not easily motivated by works or performances for which no site or commission has been specified. I half-systematically collect material; I take photos and videos; I store things and working methods, and end up assembling an art work out of them.

Whereas the choir is something of a nonstop society: a semi-closed gentlemen’s club to have a good time and promote one’s goals and skills – and make a wicked parody of it all.

In the beginning of my career I was most interested in musical structures, in working spontaneous noise into complex rhythmic patterns. After the early years, strictly conceptual and minimalistically conceived themes started to interest me more. Nowadays I create polyrhythms on interesting texts again and use them to train a new generation of screaming men.

After a recent natural-mystic video installation, the next work of art to carry out without screaming men is likely to be a Frankenstein for the 21st century. No pieces of meat from the morgue are needed to make an artificial human being. That’s all I can reveal.

Oulujoki

Composed and conducted by Petri Sirviö.
Lyrics: From a keynote address given by Samuli Paulaharju at the Oulu Deaf School in 1944.
Video directed by Antti Pylväs.
Camera: Antti Pylväs ja Ville Pohjonen.
Edited by Ville Pohjonen.

Kalinka

Мужкой нор “кричащих” выступает с русским классиком “Калинка”.
Composed and rehearsed by Petri Sirviö.
Lyrics: traditional.
Video directed by Antti Pylväs.
Camera and editing by Ville Pohjonen.

MoMA

Huutajat performing at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan on Septemper 15, 2008. On the previous day the choir performed at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

Waterloo

Congratulations: 50 Years of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Forum, Copenhagen. October 22, 2005.
Composed and conducted by Petri Sirviö.
Lyrics by Stig Anderson.

Pohjoinen Kotimaamme

The first record of Mieskuoro Huutajat was the EP Record Pohjoinen kotimaamme, which reached the Top 10 in the Finnish charts in 1988. It includes the essential patriotic songs.

Six National Anthems

The second EP, Six National Anthems, came out in 1990. The chosen anthems come from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany, United States and Soviet Union.

H.Y.V.Ä

The third recording, H.Y.V.Ä, was released at the Roskilde Festival in 1994. The CD version contains the EP Six National Anthems. In 2001, a special CD edition was released in Japan. The Japanese edition of H.Y.V.Ä contains the album 10th Anniversary Concert.

10th Anniversary Concert

The first full-lenght album of Mieskuoro Huutajat, 10th Anniversary Concert, was released in 1998. The album was recorded live at the 10th anniversary concert of Huutajat in their home town, Oulu, on December 6th, 1997.

The concert is the basic form of a choral performance. This also holds true for a screaming men’s choir, whose roots are as much in performance and conceptual art as they are in different music genres.

Mieskuoro Huutajat gives a full-length concert a few times a year. At least thirty men populate the stage. A concert consists of one or two sets, depending on the space and occasion.

The choir has been invited to events of widely varying music genres. Memorable performance venues include the Roskilde Festival Main Stage, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as the outdoors concerts in the heat of Arles and the backyard of the Reykjavik Art Museum in December.

Both in the Vienna Konzerthaus and Cologne Philharmonic, Huutajat has managed to wake up an audience mesmerised by Stockhausen’s Stimmung.

In the London Savoy, the choir took the Pet Shop Boys fans into another kind of reality.

In the 25th anniversary year closing concert at Tampere-talo, the performance of the seventy-headed grand choir was supplemented by video material and text installations. Multimedia shows are likely to become a constant part of the Huutajat repertory. Yet the choir needs no special effects to capture the listener’s and viewer’s attention for a full concert.

Mieskuoro Huutajat have participated in several scenic collaborations with internationally acknowledged artists.

For the Venice Biennale 2001, Huutajat collaborated with Carolyn Carlson in the dance production J Beuys Song. The piece was performed six times at the biennale, and later also in Palermo and Kuopio.

The choir’s overwhelming power is a wonderful thing. Sometimes, however, there is a need for more delicate expressions and more conceptual meanings. The context of visual arts has proved appropriate in this respect.

The first longer visual works in which Huutajat participated were the video installations by Sirviö for the Pori Art Museum and the Kleines Helmhaus in Zurich, and a video compilation for the Musée d’Art Moderne de Ville de Paris.

In the opening festivities of two museums of contemporary art – SMAK in Ghent and Kiasma in Helsinki – the choir gave performances designed specifically for the art museum context.

The AMORPH! biennale, ”Summit for the Micronations”, took place on the Harakka Island in Helsinki. Huutajat provided the security service for the summit. Besides, the choir members acted as immigration officers and the welcoming committee.

The choir has twice co-operated with Jesper Just, who is best known for his video art. It Will all End in Tears (now in the MoMA collection) was shot inside the Manhattan Supreme Court, on the roof of the Silvercup Studios, and in a forgotten Japanese garden in Staten Island. In another work by Just, the multimedia performance True Love is Yet to Come, the choir shows up as ghostly 3-D projections. The choral parts for both works were provided by Sirviö.

”Sorry Speech” is a video installation by Sirviö. In this three-channel piece, members of Huutajat shout and recite excerpts from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology speech to Australia’s indigenous peoples. ”Sorry Speech” was created for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

In the video installation ”Sestina”, Huutajat gives a heartfelt rendition of a 17th century Italian libretto by Scipione Agnelli. Sirviö designed the work for three screen projections and two video monitors. The installation was first shown in Sirviö’s own exhibition at the Oulu Museum of Art.

Huutajat has shown up in a few cinematic productions. These films include both documentary and fictional works.

The best known cinematic collaboration is Mika Ronkainen’s documentary Huutajat – Screaming Men from 2003. The documentary follows Petri Sirviö and the rest of the choir on their tours – from Oulu to Tokyo, from Reykjavik to Paris. The film shows how the careful member recruitment and serious rehearsals build up a basis for strongly harmonised performances, regardless of whether they take place in institutional platforms or natural surroundings.

In 1996, Huutajat appeared in the soundtrack of Tykho Moon, a sci-fi film by the famous comics writer Enki Bilal. In July 2012, the choir participated in the Russian director Andrey Silvestrov’s cinematic work Birmingham Ornaments which is based on the poet Yuri Leiderman’s texts. Film fragments were shot among the weeds and willows on the Hietasaari and Pikisaari islands in Oulu. The finished work was shown in the 2013 Venice Biennale. The production, including rehearsals, took one week.

Huutajat has always taken great delight in giving surprise concerts. It is as if the need to astonish people were a built-in feature of a screaming men’s choir. The choir has arguably arranged flash mobs long before the term was coined.

When the choir arrives in a place, the conductor and his agents start to look for promising locations to astound unwarned people, time permitting. Surprise gigs take place anywhere – deep in the nature, in and around small towns and big cities.

At the opening of a sculpture exhibition held on a wet swamp in Pudasjärvi, Huutajat came into sight at the edge of the swamp and started to approach the conductor who was laying in a pit hidden from the audience. When the choir stopped, the conductor stood up and launched the vocal performance.