Canticum Novum,since I was nine.
Wodzisław Śląski, 2015. I was nine.
I joined Canticum Novum at nine — the youngest in a room of fifty children age nine to seventeen. Conductor: dr Emilia Kopiec. Two rehearsals a week, Thursdays and Fridays. No breaks worth mentioning.
The first trip was Barcelona, July 2018. I was twelve. We sang Vox estis lux mundi inside Sagrada Família — a building still under construction. My voice broke later that year.
By the next autumn I was singing bass with the older kids. A year later I was in the front row. The role kept widening — mentoring the new nine-year-olds, editing the recordings, designing the posters. By 2024 I was the oldest member, and the one fifty kids on a bus to Rome asked which church we were singing in next.
The trips. Fifty-something concerts.
The rhythm of choir trips. Get off the bus, go straight to the rehearsal space. Get back on the bus, sleep. Sometimes a cathedral in between, sometimes a parish church, always in that order.
What I remember is mostly the buses between them — overnight from Wodzisław Śląski to Rome, fifty kids asleep across the seats, the conductor reading in the front. The work happened in rehearsal rooms no one remembers. The hours happened on the road between them.
Frauenkirche, Munich. June 2025.
Munich, June 2025. The Frauenkirche. About a thousand people. I gave a peace speech.
Peace beginning in the heart, kindness over hate, what young people can do — the kind of thing the occasion called for. The one line that wasn't: “Music has no borders.” Standing in a room of singers from across the world singing the same Latin, it briefly stopped being a cliché. The rest was what peace speeches are made of.
Eleven years of choir had already put me on stage often enough that the walking up — the microphone, the thousand strangers, the cold stone — had stopped registering as something to be afraid of. The Frauenkirche was the first time I noticed it. I'd been training for that minute since I was nine without knowing what it was training me for.
Hackathon pitch rooms, startup-competition stages, sales calls for EduChat — same trained-out reflex. The choir didn't teach me what to say in any of those rooms. It taught me the part where you walk in and don't flinch.
Eleven years. What it taught.
One white sock in an all-black formation is visible from row five. We rehearsed this for eleven years. One wrong note in fifty voices is louder than the right forty-nine.
Singing Gaude mater Polonia a thousand times doesn't make you patriotic. It makes you specific. Singing the Sanctus a thousand times doesn't make you Catholic. It makes you careful with text you didn't write.
Fifty kids age nine to seventeen and a tour bus. By the third day of any trip the nine-year-olds are calling me to fix things their parents would have fixed at home. I have learned the answer to most of those things, and which ones go to the conductor.
The conductor is also my mother. The two rehearsals a week were also two days I had to be perfect at home. Eleven years of having the same person at the front of the rehearsal hall and at the kitchen table when it went badly.