Rehearsal notes · No. 05 · Rehearsal notes
A year of Tuesdays, read back through the rehearsal notebook
Reading a season of rehearsal notes in one sitting is a strange experience, because the shape of the year is obvious on paper and completely invisible while you are living it. These are the patterns that showed up in all seven notebooks.
- Rehearsal
- 14 July 2026
- Written up
- 26 August 2026
- Reading
- 8 minutes
- Room
- Gràcia and Eixample, Catalonia
September: a full room and nothing in tune
The first Tuesday back is always the best attended and the worst sounding evening of the year. Everyone has had a summer off, several people have not sung a note since June, and the room is full of goodwill and completely unsupported tone. The notes from every September say some version of the same thing: pitch sagging by the second phrase, breathing high and short, nobody listening across the room because half the choir is busy catching up with the other half.
What the notebooks also record is how quickly it comes back. By the third week the sound is recognisably ours again, which used to surprise us and no longer does. The mistake we made in the early years was programming the season's hardest piece in that first month, when enthusiasm was highest, and then watching it stall through November. The hard piece now goes in around week five, when the voices have returned and the new singers know where they stand.
The long middle, where nothing improves
Somewhere between late November and February every year there is a stretch of six or seven rehearsals in which, according to the notes, nothing gets better. The pieces are past the excitement of being new and nowhere near being ready. Attendance dips, partly because of weather and partly because a Tuesday in January is a hard sell. The notebook entries from this period are short and slightly grim, mostly lists of bars we ran and a sentence saying the same bars would be run again.
The improvement is happening; it is simply too slow to be audible from one week to the next. Reading four consecutive January entries in a row makes that obvious, which is one reason we keep the notebook at all. We have also learned to protect the last twenty minutes of these evenings for something finished and enjoyable, usually a short piece the choir already knows well. Ending a difficult rehearsal on something that sounds good is not indulgence; it is why people come back the following week.
Spring, and the fortnight when a piece stands up
Every piece we have performed has had a single rehearsal where it stopped being assembled and started being sung, and the notebooks identify them with suspicious consistency. It is usually about three weeks before a concert, usually the evening after a run where nobody had to stop, and it is audible within about eight bars. People look up from the page. The dynamics happen without being asked for. The long chord at the end sits still. Nobody can make this evening arrive earlier, and it has never once failed to arrive.
The tell, looking back, is the run-through where the piece is merely correct: dull, accurate and lifeless, with the whole choir concentrating hard. That week always reads in the notes as a disappointment and always immediately precedes the good one. Correctness has to become automatic before anything else can happen on top of it, and the flat, dutiful rehearsal is what that sounds like from inside. We now expect it, name it when it happens, and tell the newer singers not to worry.
Said in the room
- Hardest piece introduced around week five, not week one.
- Winter rehearsals end with something the choir already knows.
- A dull, accurate run usually comes a week before a good one.
- Three weeks out is when a piece tends to stand up.
What the notebook keeps getting right
The entries that have earned their place are the specific ones. Bar ninety-four, altos late because the tenors move first and it sounds like a cue. The vowel in the second verse drifting wide when the choir gets loud. The fact that we always start a particular motet under pitch because it begins quietly and everybody hedges. General remarks about the evening being good or bad are worth nothing a year later; a note about one bar and why it fails is worth reading every time the piece comes round again.
The other thing worth writing down is who was absent and what they missed, not for discipline but so that the following week does not silently assume knowledge half the section does not have. Five minutes at the start covering the entry taught last Tuesday costs a rehearsal almost nothing and saves a fortnight of one section being quietly wrong. Most of what this notebook has taught us, over seven years, is that small and boring things repeated weekly are what a choir is actually made of.