Rehearsal notes · Tuesday evenings
Sixteen to twenty-four people, one room, forty minutes on eight bars.
Rehearsal notes from a small amateur choir in Gràcia, Barcelona: learning a part by ear, breathing and blend, foreign vowels, and concert nerves.
An amateur choir in Gràcia and Eixample, Catalonia — rehearsing since 2019.
Barcelona, Spain
- SopranoC4 – A5carries the tune more often than it wants to
- AltoG3 – D5holds the middle and is the first to hear a wrong chord
- TenorC3 – A4small section, loud opinions, usually right
- BassE2 – D4sets the pitch for everybody above it
Chairs go in a shallow arc, two rows deep, with the piano on the alto side. Nobody stands at the front except whoever is conducting that week.
Programme of notes
Most recent first. Each note was written in the week of the rehearsal it describes, then left alone.
- A year of Tuesdays, read back through the rehearsal notebookSeptember to June in a small amateur choir: the loud early weeks, the long middle where nothing improves, and the fortnight when a piece finally stands up.
- Nerves: the forty minutes before a small concertWhat actually happens to a small amateur choir in the hour before it sings, and the unglamorous routine we now follow to get through it in reasonable shape.
- Singing in a language you do not speak: vowels, stress and honestyLatin, German and a Catalan folk setting, sung by people who mostly speak none of them. What we get wrong, and the rehearsal that was entirely consonants.
- Breathing, blend and the long note: what Tuesdays are really forTwenty minutes of warm-up, a section that stopped pushing, and the awkward business of holding a note together. Notes from a winter of unglamorous rehearsals.
- Learning your part by ear when the page still looks like weatherHow a choir with three kinds of reader teaches a line: call and response, the piano used sparingly, and the point where the score stops being decoration.
The shape of a Tuesday
Ninety minutes, always in the same order
The order matters more than the material. A room that starts by breathing together will sight-read badly and still sound like one choir; a room that starts by arguing about bar thirty-one will not.
- 20:30Arriving, chairs out, nobody singing yet
- 20:40Breathing, then unison on one vowel until it settles
- 20:55The hard eight bars, section by section
- 21:30The piece put back together, mistakes included
- 21:50Something we already know, sung whole, lights off at ten
Four habits
What we hold to, week after week
We are a small amateur choir of sixteen to twenty-four voices, rehearsing once a week in a borrowed room in Gràcia. These notes exist so that a singer who missed a fortnight can catch up without having to ask anyone.
Latest note: A year of Tuesdays, read back through the rehearsal notebook, written up 26 August 2026.
- Everybody sings the part; nobody performs it alone.
- Learn it by ear, then check it against the page.
- Being lost is information, not a confession.
- End every rehearsal singing something whole.