The World Choir Games gets going in earnest this weekend. Now, if you’re going to choose a place to host the choral equivalent of the Olympics, you couldn’t find a better place than Riga, one of this year’s European capitals of culture: not least because Latvia’s own group, Latvian Voices, were one of the champions of the last games in the US in 2012, but also because so much of Latvia’s national identity is bound up in a tradition of choral singing.



The stats for the event in Riga are impressive enough – 27,000 singers from 73 countries, making up 460 choirs, competing in 29 categories – but it’s how singing taps into the national psyche in Latvia that makes the biggest impression of all. I’ve been there for Radio 3’s Music Matters, and what made the profoundest impact was how genuinely Latvians, from composers to the prime minister, from opera stars to folk musicians (and you can hear interviews with all of them on 12 July), felt that it was their singing tradition that was their small country’s greatest unifying force and cultural phenomenon. Their recent history, above all in the “singing revolution” of the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 90s, shows how important the mass-song events of the song festivals (in which tens of thousands of people get together to sing in events held every five years) were in mobilising a unity of peaceful but irrefutable purpose among the Latvian population, leading to their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

In the context of the looming and ongoing crisis in music education funding in the UK, it was instructive to hear about a participatory musical culture that seems, on the face of it, much stronger than ours – it’s true that every Latvian, including the country’s politicians, knows, loves and sings a national treasury of folk tunes – but which is also surprisingly fragile. As Ivars Cinkuss, one of Latvia’s most celebrated choral conductors and one of the judges of this year’s World Choir Games, told me, Latvia’s choral tradition dates back only to the mid-19th century. It’s a combination of hard work, of generations of unbroken education (music education is one of the few things that Latvians thank the Soviet occupation for), that led to the apparently natural connection between Latvia and song.



As that relationship is celebrated throughout the World Choir Games – in which, as the host nation, 7,000 of the competing singers will be Latvian – it’s proof both of how precious a phenomenon is Latvia’s story of song, across its Latvian and Russian-speaking communities, and how sensitive its continuation in the future will be. Any cutbacks in music education in Latvia’s schools, which are starting to bite, threaten to dissolve that connection between the country and its tradition of singing. That’s an international shame, because we all need the example of a country like Latvia to show us what’s possible when people get together to sing. Meanwhile, enjoy the days of concerts and competitions of the World Choir Games until the grand finale on 19 July, and support your UK representatives, including the brilliant Bradford Catholic Girls’ Choir, who I heard rehearsing a few days ago in St Peter’s Church in Riga.