From Classroom to Choir, A Complaints Choir with École Jeannine Manuel

The Complaints Choir is a community art project that invites people to sing together about everyday experiences. At its core, the project embraces humor, imagination, and shared observation. Common situations, habits, and moments from daily life become material for a collective song, written and sung with distance, playfulness, and joy.

APK Music contributed to this open and evolving project through a special commission for the 70th anniversary of École Jeannine Manuel. The school invited Aurélien Parent-Koenig, founder of APK Studios and a former student, to work with high-school students on the creation of an original Complaints Choir piece written especially for this celebration.

Over several weeks, the students worked from a blank page to create a song reflecting their shared experience of school life. The focus was on light, everyday observations, the small moments that shape a collective environment and that everyone recognises. These observations became the basis for lyrics that were lively, clever, and often humorous, offering a warm portrait of student life.

The masterclass explored the full songwriting process. Students worked on melody, harmony, structure, and bilingual lyrics, discovering how a song takes shape through collaboration. Musical ideas were approached through practice, including how familiar chord sequences appear across many songs and why they feel immediately recognisable. This allowed students to understand how music connects naturally to memory and emotion.

The project was led by Aurélien Parent-Koenig alongside Isabelle Morin, singer, pianist, and composer. Together, they guided a process that was generous, dynamic, and deeply collaborative. The atmosphere throughout the workshops was marked by curiosity, laughter, and a strong sense of collective creativity.

The final performance took place at the UNESCO building in Paris. Contributing to the Complaints Choir felt particularly meaningful. As an open-source artistic idea, it grows through participation and reinterpretation. Adding a new chapter shaped by young voices, shared music-making, and collective imagination was a genuine pleasure.