Nordic Breeze | Iberian Seas

First things first: I joined a choir! The group is called Kongl. Teknologkören (KTK). The choir was founded in 1930 and will celebrate its 95th anniversary in 2025. It is a student group within KTH (the university I am attending) but it is made up of current students, alumni, and other young adults in Stockholm. It is a mixed choir with about 40-45 members. The group is very musically talented and sings at a high skill level. Most of what we sing is in eight part harmony which is a lot of fun. This fall we have been rehearsing two long pieces for our concert at the end of October: John Rutter’s Requiem and Jaako Mäntyjärvi’s Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae. I will write another post about our fall concert and include more information on both pieces but I highly recommend listening to the recordings on YouTube that are linked above.

Everyone in the choir is Swedish, except for me and one exchange student from Japan. Rehearsal is conducted in Swedish, which has been a really fun and challenging aspect of this experience. I have been studying Swedish on my own for a few years so I do understand quite a bit but there are still large gaps. Everyone is super nice in helping translate or catch me up on anything I missed. One of the reasons I wanted to join a choir was actually to get a chance to practice my Swedish and meet some Swedes, since most of the rest of my school life is in English with other international students. People are always very quick to switch to English if I need it but they also know I want to practice my Swedish so it’s a good balance.

One of the choir’s most beloved traditions is an annual rehearsal weekend in Åland. The Åland Islands are Swedish-speaking autonomous region of Finland. They can be reached by ferry from both Sweden and Finland. We left Stockholm around noon on a Friday and took a bus about an hour and a half north to Grisselhamn. From there we took a ferry to Eckerö. This ferry was like a small cruise ship, with a few different restaurants and cafes and a duty free store. Many Swedes take the ferries just to buy alcohol on board at the duty free shop. Alcohol is taxed highly in Sweden so you can save a bit of money by buying it in the duty free, especially for larger quantities. I saw lots of people getting off the ferry with multiple crates of beer on hand trucks. The ferry ride was a couple of hours long so I explored the ship. The weather was beautiful and I spent a little bit of time on the upper deck. I also got a Finnish beer (a Lapin Kulta pale lager) at one of the cafes and played some cards with my choir friends.

Once we reached Åland we debarked in a town called Eckerö and then took a bus to Mariehamn, the capital of Åland. We walked about 25 minutes to Solhem, the guest house where we stayed for the weekend. The choir has been staying at this guest house every year for about 30 years! It is run by a lovely older couple named Annelie & Charles. It’s a beautiful and quaint property on the waterfront with two houses, a long low building with 5 or 6 guest rooms, and a boat house. It looked like something out of a fairytale, especially with the apple trees all heavy with fruit. The air was clean and crisp and delicious. We had beautiful weather all weekend, sunny with highs in the mid 60s and dipping down into the mid 50s at night. It felt a little bit like going to summer camp or stepping back in time a few decades.

We had our first rehearsal on Friday evening from 8-9 PM and then we had a hearty snack, or fika in Swedish. I had toast with butter and marmalade, an open faced sandwich with ham, cheese, cucumbers, and peppers, and some tea. I decided to go to bed at a reasonable hour and save my energy for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday was a very busy day. We had about 6 hours of rehearsal today but it was broken up with meals and extra breaks. While it was definitely tiring to sing so much in a day, it was nice to have uninterrupted time to really focus on the music and dive deep into rehearsal. The music we are singing is in eight parts and is fairly complex so it requires a bit of time just to get the notes and rhythms right before we can start building more musicality.

At one point in the afternoon we broke out into sectionals. The sopranos and tenors stayed in the main house with our director, Hanna, and the altos and basses went outside to rehearse together. We ended up singing out in the boathouse which was really cool. We were rehearsing Mäntyjärvi’s Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae, which commemorates the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia. The Estonia sank in September 1994, 30 years ago, on its route between Stockholm and Tallinn, Estonia. It was one of the worst maritime disasters ever, resulting in 852 deaths and only 137 survivors. Rehearsing this song in a boathouse in Finland with views of the water and of passenger ferries sailing through the archipelago really brought additional depth and meaning to the piece.

Rehearsal ended at 5 PM and by that point we were all tired and easily distracted and ready to just hang out and have some fun together. The main event of the evening was a gasque. I’ve explained a little bit about gasques in some of my other posts but hopefully this will give a closer look into what a proper Swedish gasque is like! In short, a gasque is a dinner party that involves lots of singing and other types of entertainment.

The theme for this gasque was “högt över havet” which translates to “high over the sea” and is a reference to either a Finnish song or something from Eurovision (I’m not entirely sure about the details but it was explained to me that it was funny and fitting for a weekend in Finland). For casual gasques, it is customary to dress up according to the theme. I was incredibly impressed by everyone’s costumes. We had people dressed as the sun, clouds, rainbows, angels, pilots, parachuters, birds, satellites, and more. I didn’t have the time to put together a proper costume but I was able to grab my Boeing t-shirt and IKEA bucket hat. I thought the Boeing shirt was pretty funny, since they make planes that fly over the sea, and I couldn’t think of any better time to wear an IKEA bucket hat.

I tried not to take too many pictures during the night and I also want to respect people’s privacy but here are a few pictures from the gasque.

The gasque started at 6:30 and probably ended around 10. Gasques are typically led by two Toastmasters who act as MCs for the night, calling the shots on what happens next and making sure everyone is fed and entertained. We did a lot of singing during the gasque (surprising no one). One thing to know about Swedes is that while they may typically be shy and reserved, they LOVE drinking songs.

The different bits of entertainment performed throughout a gasque are called “gyckels” and anybody can sign up to perform one. A gyckel might be a song, dance, poem, joke, skit, or some other type of performance. If you want to perform a gyckel, you tell the Toastmasters and throughout the evening they call up the different people who signed up to perform. Many different subgroups of the choir prepared gyckels; some were coordinated on the day of the gasque and others have been in the works for weeks or even months. Here are some of the highlights:

• All of the women sang a song and all of the men sang another song.
• All of the people who came to Åland on the earlier ferry on Friday sang a song making fun of all the people who came on the later ferry. For this we changed the lyrics to Pie Jesu from Rutter’s Requiem (the piece we’re currently rehearsing) to lyrics that essentially translated to “we came first and you came last.”
• To do the preparation and cleanup for the gasque, we were all divided into three groups. Each of these groups prepared a gyckel. My group was in charge of preparing dessert (which was pie) so we rewrote the lyrics to a Swedish soccer song to be about pie.
• A few different groups of two or three people sang folk songs or pop songs. Swedish folk songs are incredibly beautiful and everyone in this choir has a gorgeous voice so I really enjoyed these.
• Everyone who had never been on a choir trip to Åland before (that’s me!) were serenaded by two of the more experienced choirites performing a very memorable two-person rendition of Mad World in Swedish.
• One non-musical gyckel that we had was an epic poem that someone wrote. This is apparently a tradition and it gets more elaborate and well executed every year. From what I understood of it, which was maybe 20%, it was quite good and I did really enjoy the rhyme scheme and rhythm.

One of the first things I received when I joined the choir is the Flerstämt, a pocket-sized songbook full of all of the choir’s favorite folk songs and drinking songs. The book was compiled and published just for KTK and they’re actually in the process of creating a revised version that will add some new songs, remove ones that aren’t sung often, and fix some typos. I didn’t count how many songs are in the book exactly but it’s 188 pages long. We actually rehearsed a few of these songs on Friday evening but they’re mostly learned through just singing them at various social events. These songs get sung whenever a handful of choir members are together, whether that’s after rehearsal, at a bar, or in the sauna (more on that later).

We sang lots of songs from the Flerstämt songbook together throughout the gasque. We sang one song where you sing the first verse through with words once and then the choir hums the melody while someone gets up and gives a short speech. The caveat here is that each speech needs to be in a different language and the song only ends when you’ve used every language someone in the room speaks. We had Swedish, English, Japanese, Mandarin, German, French, Bulgarian, and a few more. Someone encouraged me to give the speech in English. It’s much easier to give a speech in a language no one else understands so no one wants to do it in English. The most memorable was when one of the men who was dressed as a duck for his costume got up and gave a very solemn speech entirely in quacks. For the sake of his digital footprint I’m not going to share that video publicly, but it exists.

By the end of the evening everyone was getting a bit tipsy and tired of sitting and ready for the party to continue. The Toastmasters ended the gasque and we pushed the tables aside to make room to dance. Someone sat down at the piano and started playing a waltz and to my great surprise, lots of people paired up and started waltzing together. I learned that Swedes learn to dance a little bit in schools and waltzing to folk music is fairly common, especially at family parties. It was really cool to see people dancing together like that just for fun.

Throughout the gasque I was really moved by how special this kind of event is. It felt almost old fashioned, like how things maybe used to be before radios and televisions and phones. To spend an evening with friends eating and drinking and making music and dancing together is perhaps one of the very best things you can do in life. It was warm and sweet and funny and genuine and it just made me feel very happy.

After the gasque the party moved next door into the other house and became a bit more of a typical college party. The waltzing continued, this time to a Spotify playlist of folk music. Some people were hanging out outside or in the boathouse.

Around 11 PM someone got the sauna going. I don’t really love the feeling of being in the sauna but there is something magical about the overall experience. This sauna was definitely designed for about 4 people and I counted up to 16 people crammed in at some point. “Cozy” doesn’t begin to describe it. And of course there was plenty of singing in the sauna. The choir even has a copy of the Flerstämt songbook that is dedicated for use in the sauna.

My favorite part of the night was going swimming after the sauna. The air temperature was down to the mid 50s which was definitely cold but not miserable. The water was very cold and refreshing. It really is amazing what the combination of sauna and cold water does to your body. It makes you feel incredibly alive. It was a clear night and the stars were absolutely gorgeous. You could even see the Milky Way with the naked eye which has been on my bucket list for a long time. I wish I could have gotten a great picture of it so I can remember it forever. Floating in the water looking up at the stars will forever be a favorite memory for me. It was very special. I enjoyed going back and forth between the water and the sauna a few times and then I took a shower and went to bed around 2 AM.

On Sunday morning we had one more rehearsal from 10 – 11 AM then we all worked together to pack, clean up, and leave. We serenaded Charles, the guesthouse owner, to thank him for all his hard work and hospitality. To get home to Stockholm we took a different ferry that left from Mariehamn. This ferry was actually a Viking cruise ship and it was much bigger than the ferry we took to get here. The journey was about 3-4 hours long. I enjoyed exploring the ship but it was a bit overwhelming and there wasn’t really anywhere quiet to sit. The weather was nice so I mostly sat up on the top deck and enjoyed the view.

The views were amazing, especially as we began to pass through the Stockholm archipelago. It’s so wild that these massive ships can pass through such narrow channels. We arrived back in Stockholm at sunset and I made my way home from the ferry terminal.

This really was a once in a lifetime experience and I had so much fun. I love this choir already and this was an amazing way to dive deep and really get to know the music and the people. I’m excited to see what the rest of the year brings with KTK!