“THESE GIRLS ARE ON FIRE!” vokal.total 2015
Tuuletar took a rewarding trip to Graz, Austria and came home with 2 awards and hearts filled with gratitude.
Blog written by Venla Ilona Blom
Words cannot describe the week we had at the annual VOKAL TOTAL festival in the beautiful town of Graz in Southern Austria. We left Finland feeling excited and curious but we would have never guessed to come home with such an experience.
Our week had a bumpy start right from the beginning. The airline managed to lose some of our luggage on our way to Vienna and we also had to take a trip to the hospital in Graz after one of us getting hit by a car. Luckily the lost luggage found it’s way eventually to Graz and the injury from the car hit wasn’t too serious. However, these kind of experiences did make us all well aware that you can never avoid setbacks and you have to be prepared for everything.
We had our first performance in Graz right away after landing. We took part for the Opening Ceremony of Vokal Total 2015 and performed two songs in a beautiful market place in the central of the city of Graz. We also gave a small interview for an Austrian TV-channel and met some of the other groups and jury members.
Vokal Total has been running for 15 years now. It is an annual competition and platform for vocal groups from all over the world and every year different vocal groups, festival organizers, agents, bookers and a cappella lovers gather to this little town to celebrate the art of A Cappella. We were lucky to be one of the participating groups in the POP-cathegory this year. Vokal Total has all and all 5 different categories with different amount of participating groups. The POP-category is by far the largest, having 16 groups in total to compete for the prestigious Ward Swingle Awards.The other categories are JAZZ, COMEDY, CLASSICAL and BEATBOX.
We have already quite a lot of experience in vocal group competitions. Since 2013 we have been participating in 4 competitions, all of them internationally acclaimed and honored amongst the people in the a cappella scene. We have always chosen to perform our own music, in our own way. We make music in Finnish language and our compositions and arrangements are completely the results of our unique vision and collective working methods. We do not use coaches or arrangers, our music is us, the four ladies of Tuuletar and everything we represent. This has always been our mission and we have always been very well respected and credited because of that. However, when it comes to attending competitions, where each group has their own strengths and each jury has their own criterias, it is surprisingly hard to stay true to your own, exotic music without feeling a bit of an outsider. We respect all vocal music and have always been so amazed by the level of skills and talent while meeting the other contestants, in every competition that we have taken part of. But when it comes to arranging and composing, we do have a bit rebellious way of thinking, which means that sometimes we do not meet the standards that the jury members in a cappella competitions want to see and hear.
Luckily for us, this was not AT ALL an issue in VOKAL TOTAL and Graz. We performed our competition program on Wednesday afternoon with a total dedication, aiming to reach each person in the audience and share our love and passion for the music that we do.
And we succeeded – Oh boy, we REALLY succeeded.
The response from the audience was magical. The response from the jury was magical. The response from ourselves – that is the hardest thing – was magical as well. We felt that this time, everything fit. We ended up winning The Audience Award in the afternoon POP 1 category, The Gold Diploma aaaaaand The Ward Swingle Silver Award, which is the second highest price in the whole competition.
People would stop us on the street later the week and sing “KUROOO!” (a hook in our hit single “Kohma”.) This proves that music itself is a universal language and we do not need to understand the words to feel connected with each other and to deliver emotions.
The winner of The Ward Swingle Gold Award was a beautiful group Zenith from South Korea that we were lucky enough to spend a lot of time with. This is the one important thing to mention here: Award – that’s a prize, a recognition, an accomplishment. You can look at the diploma on the wall and be proud and feel honored. But that is material. Experience – that is something you carry inside of you, where ever you go, that is only yours and that no one can take away from you. This is why we want to emphasis the fact that the awards that we won do not compete with the amazing people we had a chance to meet, the beautiful and inspiring music we were lucky to hear, the exciting and grand venues we got to perform in and all the laughter, tears and feelings we got to share within the four of us. We do what we do because we love each other and our mutual energy and chemistry is something we consider to be a matter of faith. We do what we do because we love our language, we respect our roots and we are driven to explore.
During this week in Graz we met so many exciting groups and saw how at the end, everyone shares the same passion, a passion and interest for music made only with human voices. We think that the A Cappella world is sometimes hard to fit into, but this experience showed us once again how big and beautiful community it is and how we want to be part of it. We hope that our approach for making our own music with our own language will encourage other groups to explore that aspect as well. However, we do what we do because that’s our choice, and we respect and cherish each and every group who are making music with their own voices, in their chosen way. And when it comes to innovation, we even hope that there are few people who will get provoked by us and think “I am not sure I like them. I want to do something else!” …and hopefully they will end up creating something new and exciting.
There are a lot of thrilling things coming up in the future for us and we have already made MANY engagements for next year. TUULETAR will be performing all over the world and we hope to make many new acquaintances and meet up with our old friends in different occasions. There is a lot of new TUULETAR-music in the making and we are very happy to announce that our debut album will be released in the spring 2016.
Thank you Graz and Vokal Total. Thank you for the music.
With love Venla, Sini, Piia and Johanna
