“In Japan, it’s an end-of-year tradition to sing “Ode to Joy,” the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The song is so well-known in Japan that it’s known simply as daiku, literally “number nine.” In Osaka, a 10,000-person-strong “Number Nine Chorus” of amateur singers performs daiku every December, to thundering effect. While there are some professionals involved (the soloists and orchestra), the Number Nine Chorus is largely a community effort. And the sound of 10,000 singers, trained or untrained, is unbelievable.…The Beethoven craze began, strangely enough, during World War I, when German soldiers being held as prisoners in Japan staged the very first performance of number nine here.
The Japanese liked what they heard, and by the mid-20th century, number nine had become a holiday hit.…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlQZyTF_LY
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
that mental floss link to the YT vid has been shut down.. Here's another one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlQZyTF_LY
Mike W
******
Thanks, Mike. Thanks also for the Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener, we're going to post it on theshelterblog.
Is there a date for when this takes place in Osaka?