Rehearsal notes · No. 04 · Concerts
Nerves: the forty minutes before a small concert
We sing publicly three or four times a year, always to small rooms and always to people who mostly know somebody in the choir. It is not a demanding audience, and the nerves are considerable anyway.
- Rehearsal
- 25 November 2025
- Written up
- 14 January 2026
- Reading
- 6 minutes
- Room
- Gràcia and Eixample, Catalonia
What the nerves actually are
Almost nobody in the choir is afraid of being judged as a singer. The fear, when people describe it, is much more specific: coming in wrong on an exposed entry, being the one audible mistake in a quiet bar, letting down the three people standing beside you who have worked at this since September. It is a social fear rather than a musical one, which is why reassurance about the quality of the singing does very little and why standing next to someone reliable does a great deal.
It also has a physical shape that is worth naming, because naming it helps. Breathing goes shallow and high in the chest, which is precisely the opposite of what singing needs. Hands go cold, the mouth dries, and the sense of pitch becomes unreliable in the first minute or two. Everybody in the room is experiencing some version of this and nearly everybody assumes they are the only one, which we now say out loud in the warm-up because it is true and because it visibly helps.
The forty minutes, in order
We arrive an hour before, and the first twenty minutes have nothing to do with music. Coats away, water found, the standing order settled on the actual floor rather than in theory, and a walk to the back of the room so that everyone has seen the space from where the audience will sit. Then the ordinary warm-up, the same one as every Tuesday, deliberately unaltered. Familiarity is the whole point; a special pre-concert routine would only announce that this evening is different.
After that we sing one easy thing all the way through, never the hardest piece and never the opening number. The aim is to feel the room and to hear ourselves in it, not to fix anything, and we resist the strong temptation to rehearse the difficult bar one final time. Ten minutes before, we stop entirely. People drift, drink water, go outside into the street air. The final gathering is brief, quiet, and mostly consists of reminding everyone to breathe out before the first entry.
Said in the room
- Arrive an hour early; first twenty minutes are logistics.
- The ordinary warm-up, unchanged from a Tuesday.
- One easy piece through, to hear the room.
- No last-minute repair of the difficult bar.
- Ten quiet minutes before you walk on.
Things that go wrong and do not matter
At our second concert the tenors came in four bars early, realised it collectively, and stopped. There was a silence of perhaps two seconds, the piece carried on from the next phrase, and afterwards not one person in the audience mentioned it. We have since dropped a folder mid-piece, started a motet a full tone flat, and lost a soprano to a coughing fit that took her out of the room and back in again. All of these felt enormous on the night and none of them survived the walk home.
The useful lesson is that recovery is a rehearsable skill and panic is not. We practise finding our place: the section leader gives a nod at the start of a phrase, everyone who is lost comes back in there rather than guessing, and anyone genuinely adrift simply stops singing and waits, which is silent and invisible. An amateur choir that knows how to rejoin cleanly sounds far better than one where everybody is privately terrified of the one bar they might miss.
The walk home
We do not hold a post-mortem on the night, which took a couple of years to learn. Everyone is elated or deflated out of all proportion, memories of the performance are wildly unreliable in both directions, and the person convinced they ruined the third piece is almost always wrong. Whatever gets decided in that state has to be undone in January. The rule is that nobody discusses what went wrong until the following Tuesday, and on the night we simply go and sit somewhere with a drink.
The following week we do talk, and the notebook for the concert is usually short. Two or three genuine things go in, phrased as work for next term rather than as blame: the opening was under pitch because we started cold, the second piece was too fast because of nerves, the ending of the last one was the best it has ever been. Then we hand out something new, and the whole slow business of learning a part by ear starts again.