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.

Northgate Chorus began in the spring of 2019 with seven people in a borrowed room above a bakery in Gràcia, because one of us owned a folder of photocopied Renaissance motets and had nobody to sing them with. We are between sixteen and twenty-four voices now, depending on the month and on who is away, and we still rehearse on Tuesday evenings from half past eight until ten, which is late almost everywhere else and entirely ordinary here. There is no audition, no uniform, and one battered upright piano that goes flat every August.

Roughly a third of the choir reads music fluently, a third reads it slowly and with visible effort, and a third does not read it at all and often sings better than either group. We stopped treating that as a problem to be solved somewhere around our second winter. Parts are taught in the room, by ear and by repetition, with the score on the stand for anyone who wants it. What we ask instead is that people turn up, listen hard to the voices on either side of them, and say plainly when they are lost.

These pages are the rehearsal notebook, tidied a little. They record what we worked on, what went wrong, and the small things that turned out to matter: where to breathe, when a chord stops being four notes and becomes one, how much a room changes everything. They are written first for our own singers, particularly anyone who missed a fortnight and would rather not ask, and second for anyone elsewhere who sings in a small choir and would like proof that other small choirs also spend forty minutes on eight bars.