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Calgary Philharmonic choir puts followers’ tweets to music

In a joint initiative with Tourism Calgary, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus recently decided to take to engage with its 1100+ twitter followers, asking for their help on a special project.

“How do you warm up in the cold?” the tweet began. “Tweet us your ideas and our CPO Chorus will sing your tweets on video.”

Now, out of 1100 followers, you’d have thought the CPO Chorus would’ve received at least a few hundred responses. But only 20 people came back to them.

Undeterred, Timothy Shantz, the chorus master, spent a couple of hours arranging the tweets to fit Carl Orff’s powerful O Fortuna (if you don’t know the name, you’ll recognize the tune).

According to Diana Adams at Bit Rebels, shooting the video proved harder than expected, with many in the choir unable to stop themselves from giggling mid-song at the absurdity of it all. Well, would you have been able to keep a straight face singing “splash some Baileys or Kahlua in your mug of hot cocoa” to that tune? But it certainly works – take a look for yourself below.

The singers of the CPO Chorus aren’t the only ones to have put tweets to music. Earlier this year, The Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer made an appearance at the Shorty Awards where she sang a hilarious song of tweets by celebrities. Each verse of the song was, therefore, 140 characters or less, and included such delights as:

“No no I didn’t go to England, I went to London” – @ParisHilton

“This weekend I’m going to try to find out if I’m connected to the moon” – @DAVID_LYNCH

“Catastrophe’s a strong word, let’s all agree to call it a whoopsie-daisy” – @BPGlobalPR

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
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