BILLION TRILLION STARS

20 Apr, 2026

queerchor schweiz's second project.

Yesterday was queerchor schweiz's wrap party for our second project!*

* I wasn't in the choir for the first project, but I watched them perform in Lucerne and knew I had to audition someday!

About

From the program brochure:

Stories of queer homelands: caught between inclusion and exclusion, from the inner self or in connection with the environment, in the boundlessness of the stars and the narrowness of our biographies: in hillbilly villages, wannabe metropolises and on the road. Tradition, strangeness, reconciliation, exile, queer pride and self-chosen community flow together to form the foundations of life that enable queer growth and sparkles. 'billion trillion stars' turns to spaces that we must recognise, share and protect as home.

Locations

My highlights

✰ Choir "bootcamp" weekend

From January 31-February 1, we had back-to-back choir practices. Each session was about 5 hours long! When I told my sister about this, she called it a "bootcamp" because it was so intense. However, that weekend made me fall in love with choir. Commuting from Lucerne had been draining, so being able to stay overnight in Zürich and get to know people made it more fun. Before that, I'd been feeling insecure about my singing and social skills. But after a full weekend, I finally felt like I belonged.

✰ My first performance in Switzerland!

That day was stressful for many reasons, but my fears and anxieties melted away as soon as I stepped on stage. This is what I love about being in an ensemble—the mutual trust we have in each other. Even if we messed up, there was no shaming and blaming. We just learned to do better for the next performance. But even then, it didn't matter! We're not professionals. This isn't our job! We're just here to sing and spread queer joy to the audience.

✰ Performing for my friends

Ok, so we're not professionals, but we're really amazing! I was super excited to show off to my friends. And even though Daniel's heard me practice and could probably sing along to every song (including the spoken word piece lol), I was excited to show him how well we sounded together. My friends had know idea I could even sing, so they were in awe the whole time. It's great to share your hobbies with your loved ones! They want to see you succeed and shine.

✰ Favorite songs

1. My all-time favorite song was Cur chi vain la not, which is in Romansh, the fourth official language of Switzerland. As a dying language, it felt really powerful to honor it.
2. Wohin ich immer reise. The music is beautiful, and even though I didn't understand the lyrics when I first learned it, I could already feel the emotions I needed to convey. We didn't need to memorize this piece, but I loved it so much that I did anyway.
3. Second Nature was my wild card. I hated it in the beginning. Since it was arranged in parts, some of the lyrics just sounded odd and didn't make sense. But once we sang it together (and after practicing it over and over), it grew on me and it's so fun to sing. My favorite part is jumping into a falsetto for "Ain't this real time!" One time I did it so enthusiastically that the tenors sitting next to me laughed.

Reflections

When I first joined choir, I was so intimidated because most of the members had some musical background. And when Swiss people say they have a background in music, it's serious. I studied piano and music theory for 13 years, yet the questions they would casually ask during rehearsals made me scratch my head. Everyone seemed to know advanced music terminology. This isn't a complaint though, and more of a reflection of my own insecurity.

In Hong Kong, I sang in a choir for 2 years. We met once a week during the fall season in preparation for Christmas. I never practiced and it truly felt like a hobbyist choir. If I were to compare my two choir experiences, the Hong Kong choir felt like kindergarten and queerchor schweiz is university. In fact, a lot of the people in choir are PhD students in science fields!

However, there was no musical prerequisite to join queerchor schweiz, and the audition process was fairly simple. Later, I learned I wasn't the only person who felt intimidated and out-of-place.

I ended up practicing a lot at home with the aid of my piano and was able to catch up. We won't be learning anything new in the summer (though I might have to learn previous pieces from the first project), but I'm fairly confident that I'll get it. If not, I'll just lip sync, which I did at one point during a performance because I was so tired that no sound came out. And all was well!

Wrap party

Yesterday, about 20 of us got together in Zürich to celebrate the end of Project Two. We were put into teams by registers, but there was only one tenor who showed up, so I joined them along with two other people from different registers. That was nice, because I got to socialize with non-sopranos.

We then went to different "stations" with challenges:

• Pick a random song from our program + a random music genre, then perform it
• 10 question quiz on queer culture in music
• "Blind" karaoke
• Guess the song from our program, but the lyrics and words are backwards

Our group ended up choosing "I am what I am" (our encore song, not listed on the program), and the genre was RAP. The alto and I managed to sneak out of the rapping part by providing background vocals and dancing. We scored three 8's for our performance. (I had no idea we were going to be judged, American Idol style.)

I thought I would kill the blind karaoke challenge. However, your team members pick the song for you, and since we didn't know each other very well, they chose "Mama Mia" by Abba for me, which I'm not familiar with! I still had fun though, because I ended up trying to lip read from my team as they tried to assist me, generating a lot of laughs.

We were also the first team to guess all of the backwards song lyrics correctly! Our team ended up in second place overall.

After the games, the board members cooked us pasta for dinner. I ended up eating two plates and drank a maté, which I regretted, because I was bloated and uncomfortable for the rest of the night. I had a lot of fun, but my social battery was drained well before dinner (hence the maté, because I didn't know how to make myself a coffee in the fancy machine), so next time, I might not stay as long.

What's next

We have a short concert in May and then two performances during pride season. I'm looking forward to them, but will try to source my own Swiss outfit, because I didn't like my outfit for the performances. Plus, I'm borrowing the apron from another choir member, and I can't borrow it forever! Otherwise, I'll see if I can switch to another outfit theme just for the summer.

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#2026 #blog #choir