Rehearsal notes · No. 02 · Technique
Breathing, blend and the long note: what Tuesdays are really for
Most of what we do on a Tuesday has nothing to do with learning notes, and for a long time we treated that half of the evening as a warm-up to be got through. The winter we took it seriously was the winter the choir began to sound like one thing.
- Rehearsal
- 10 December 2024
- Written up
- 18 February 2025
- Reading
- 8 minutes
- Room
- Gràcia and Eixample, Catalonia
The first twenty minutes are not singing
People arrive from work, from a bus across the Eixample, from an argument, from a dinner they ate standing up. Whatever the evening is going to be, it is decided in the first ten minutes, and a choir that goes straight to the music sings the whole rehearsal from the throat. We start with nothing musical at all: shoulders, jaw, a minute of simply breathing out for longer than is comfortable, then a hum that nobody is allowed to make loud. It looks faintly absurd from the doorway and it is not optional.
The breathing exercise we keep coming back to is boring and works. Breathe in over four slow counts, out over eight, then over twelve, then over sixteen, without hurrying the intake. The point is not lung capacity, which most of us have plenty of, but learning to let air out slowly under control instead of spending it in the first bar. Half the intonation problems we spend evenings chasing turn out, when we are honest, to be somebody running out of air and pushing.
Blend is a listening problem
For two years we tried to fix blend by asking loud singers to sing more quietly, which is both rude and ineffective. The instruction that actually worked was different: sing so that you can hear the person on your left more clearly than yourself. Nobody can obey that precisely, but everyone adjusts in the right direction, and the adjustment is made by the singer rather than imposed from the front. Within three rehearsals the section sounded like a section instead of like four people and a chorus of quieter people behind them.
The other half of blend is vowel. Six people singing the same note on six versions of an <ah> sound produce a chord with a wobble in it that reads as tuning and is not. We now agree the vowel out loud before a phrase, sometimes exaggerating it to the point of caricature, and then pull it back. Standing arrangement matters too: we mix the section so that the two most confident voices are not next to each other, which spreads the anchor and stops one corner of the room leading the rest.
Said in the room
- Sing so you hear your neighbour more clearly than yourself.
- Agree the vowel before the phrase, not after.
- Spread confident voices across the section, not in a block.
- If it wobbles, check the vowel before you blame the tuning.
The long note, and where it comes apart
A held chord at the end of a phrase is where an amateur choir is most exposed, and ours used to lose roughly a semitone over four bars in a perfectly companionable way. Three things were going wrong at once. The note was started slightly under and never corrected, the air ran out at about bar two and everyone started pushing, and nobody had agreed where it would end, so it frayed away in three separate places over the course of a second and a half.
We fixed the ending first because it is the easiest: a held note stops on a breath from the front, and the final consonant, if there is one, is placed on that breath rather than whenever each singer feels finished. Staggered breathing solved the middle. Nobody breathes at the obvious place, everybody breathes somewhere different and quietly, coming back in under the sound rather than on top of it. The start is still the hardest part and probably always will be.
What the room does to all of it
Our rehearsal room has a low ceiling, a wooden floor and far too much furniture, and it flatters us badly. Everything sounds close, warm and slightly louder than it is, so the choir learns to sing at a level that vanishes the moment we stand anywhere with height. The first time we sang in a stone-floored hall we were inaudible for a whole verse and convinced we were producing plenty of sound, because in our heads we were still in the room above the bakery.
We deal with it by rehearsing the last fortnight before any concert in a different space whenever one can be borrowed, even a bad one. A room with a long echo teaches you to leave gaps and to cut consonants cleanly. A dry room teaches you that nothing is covering for you. Both are more useful than another Tuesday in the place where we already know how we sound, and the difference in the choir after one evening elsewhere is genuinely audible.