Idea

Singing brings joy, singing together creates a joyful togetherness and community!

This conviction meets the idea of local connectedness and global connections at the Black Forest Voices (BFV) festival – creating a place, a platform of encounters, exchange, and learning from each other at eye level.

With BFV, a new international vocal festival was created in Kirchzarten in the Black Forest in 2019 (foundation of the association in 2018), after its inventor Tobias Hug, Kirchzartener and former singer with "The Swingles", who died in 2020, came together with the vocal band Unduzo, the vocal blogger Nina Ruckhaber ("Ninas VoxBox") and the music and project manager Dörte Zillessen – committed and nationally and internationally well-networked singers and cultural professionals of the choral and vocal scene.

Since then, a vocal festival has been established in the rural town of Kirchzarten in the Black Forest, with versatile concerts, workshops, and sing-along and participatory formats for beginners and advanced singers, audiences and professionals: Encounters between amateurs and professionals, between people of local and international origin and cultural circles form the basis of the festival idea and its programs and formats.

BFV attaches great importance to the fact that the contents of the events are developed in cooperations, working groups, lively exchange with and between local musicians, associations and institutions as well as players and stars of the national and international vocal scene. These processes and the organization of the festival are led and accompanied by the artistic and organizational team of BFV, since 2022 with Tanja Pannier as overall artistic director.

The festival took place for the first time in 2019 with many participants successfully – live and on site, 2020 corona-conditioned as a 4-day pure "Web.stival", as well as 2021 as a day hybrid festival. 2022 was the first time that a purely "analog" four-day festival took place again with great support from cooperation partners, sponsors, artists, volunteers and many interested people.

The BFV Festival is – despite the now almost three years of pandemic-related restrictions – extremely recognized locally and nationally and internationally well known, networked and in lively contact with the various institutions, partners, musicians and ensembles.