18On the occasion of the World Choral Day 2017, Koral wants to promote the choral experience firmly reiterating the essential aspects and outlining some points for its future development. By signing this Manifesto you decide to give voice, support, strength and resonance to the beauty that choral singing could generate everywhere it’s given the possibility to grow and you’ll become a symbolic ambassador in your everyday life. Koral needs you to make its revolution happen: make the whole world sing in choir!

Thanks,

Koral – Everybody Sings

The Koral Manifesto

1. Singing is a natural human instinct. Every individual has the right to practice and share the experience with other people.

2. No one is tone-deaf or lacking of what is commonly called “musical ear”. Scientific studies show that only a very small percentage of the population (4%) is actually affected by a deficiency that inhibits their ability to perceive differences of musical pitch accurately. Everyone can learn to sing-by carefully listening and hearing their own voices.

3. Those who argue the opposite are in fact committing an injustice. Criticising and thus restricting a person from singing can have various unintended psychological consequences, especially if addressed towards an individual of a young age. People who have experienced such negative feedback have expressed how damaging it was, depriving them of an experience that would have enriched them from many points of view.

4. Singing brings a lot of remarkable benefits to individuals, as many studies highlighted. It contributes to their physical well-being (by strengthening the immune system, by improving the blood oxygenation and also helping with the rehabilitation from diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Aphasia) as well as their psychological well-being (by improving their mood, helping them to fight stress and depression).

5. Singing in choir – being a collective activity – amplifies the positive effects of sustaining a good relationship with others: the sense of unity, of belonging and sharing are just some of the antidotes to loneliness that choir members can experience, and that in many cases showed evidence of being a crucial support in facing serious pain, a loss or a disease.

6. Sharing the passion for singing allows to create cultural and generational bridges because it theaches one to listen the others. Choirs often consist of people with diverse age groups, religions, genders, ethnicities, origins, nationalities and personal stories. In a choir, everything is brought back to the essential basic human element of the voice, that everyone puts in at the others’ service to create a single harmony. This is why singing is a powerful instrument of social integration and cohesion.

7. The experience of a choir is a big resource especially in marginal areas. Koral described many stories of people from the whole world that found in singing and music a possibility of social redemption, of liberation from a life marked by wars, poverty, criminality and deterioration.

8. Musical and choral education should be encouraged and supported at every level with specific subsidies and activities aiming at spreading the knowledge of its incredible benefits to everyone. Investing in choral activities means investing in the health and wellness of the whole population.

9. Technology is a very useful and valuable tool to help make choral practice more accessible. For example, to support learning, to boost the participation in choirs and at the same time decrease the rate of abandonment, to be able to provide poorer areas with quality content, to get diverse and geographically dispersed people involved in the unique experience that is group singing.

10. To invest in beneficial internet and technology applications means giving a future to the choral practice, as well as the possibility of growing, regenerating, opening up to the whole world.

Sign the Manifesto and share with us the dream to make the whole world sing in choir!