The music had always been there - Copenhagen 2004-2007

Before moving to Copenhagen and starting a new life as an Anthropology student I'd always had a lot of music in my life. Always in terms of pleasure and play. My Dad always had a guitar around and loved and still loves to engage everyone to sing together. He is also always in the middle of writing news lyrics for a known song for the next one to be celebrated. It’s a Danish tradition, I think, which my father does to perfection. My bigger family, including uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins are all very fond of singing and my inner songbook consists of a lot of Danish tunes of course but also Norwegian songs as “Udsigter fra Ulriken” which my grandfather who was from Bergen sang for us, Sweden songs about freedom, peace and love by authors as Mikael Wiehe and Evert Taube were introduced and seems to have anticipated what was to come, and also Irish classics found their way and make us seem almost Vikings when the parties become loud. When the party was over my mother was the most patient lullaby singer I know. I remember that she sang every night until we fell asleep. I also believe that she's the biggest fan of this blog :-)

I took a lot of classes in flute, keyboard, piano but what I enjoyed the most was to sing in a choir. I’ve sung in many choirs, but especially one choir became very important for me. And not any choir. I was very lucky that my dear friend from Kindergarten, Anne Louise, started in a ambitious girl choir, Svenstrup Pigekor. And she wanted me to come. It was a bit far away and we traveled for an hour each Friday afternoon by ourselves in a bus. We were ten years old. I remember always falling a sleep during the trip and being afraid to miss the stop. I reminds me of when I’d just moved to Argentina (for real) in 2009 all alone this time without my Danish friends. I was always on my way in between Vincente Lopez and San Telmo, many times with the bandoneon. I took 1,5 hours more or less. Sometimes in the middle of the night after a milonga or concert I was so tired but also really afraid to miss my stop. The little bus guide book I had, el GUIA-T, only included Capital, so if I missed the stop, I was really lost (no map on the phone at that time). 

Well, this choir was also a big adventure for Stine 10 years old. If it hadn't been because the family of my friend met the the director of the choir privately I think I would never have ended up there. I was part of that choir for 10 years. And also other friends and my two younger sisters joined later on. I have the happiest memories from that time. I did my first tours! We travelled to Brussels and Luxembourg, I met older girls who was great role models and the director, Thomas Møller, and his team were amazing in how they taught us so much about Danish culture and music being demanding in a caring and loving way. 

For some reason I didn’t follow up much on the music in Copenhagen. I was very occupied with this new big city that I had always dreamt about since my parents talked about their youth in the Capital of Denmark. I had just traveled in South America and Asia for 9 months, was into Photography, coping with my Jutlandic dialects among all the trendy Copenhageners, having a very serious boyfriend who by the way was a musician but still living in my home town and so on. But I was missing it a lot…. I’d never thought of it being a way of living at all. Until that point it had never been music as an art that fascinated me, it was more the joy of doing it, sharing it. Something that needed to be there, that had always been there. Today having studied music in an ethnomusicological way, I guess my relation to music was ceremonial in some way. It was something that made me feel at home, a way to relate to others that I loved, that made me feel part of something bigger.