Repertoire

With some 150 years of history, choro repertoire is already very extensive and still growing. One of the challenges we face at Choro Camp, then, is how to find or create common musical ground. No doubt this will happen in the most organic fashion as it always has—on the fly in actual rodas de choro.

That said, at a typical roda in Brazil or elsewhere the “regulars” have a shared repertoire that makes up much of what will be played whenever they gather. So we’re recommending some repertoire to prepare, to whatever degree possible, in advance.

The collections of repertoire we’ll list below come in two varieties:

Core Repertoire — 9 tunes we’ll focus on in our morning and early afternoon classes. For these, we’ll share extensive support materials: play-along video accompaniments, sheet music and reference recordings.
Supplementary Repertoire — Additional repertoire you may want to work on if time allows. These tunes are selected and grouped so as to facilitate participation at camper-led evening rodas.

Core Repertoire 2026

The 9 tunes that will make up our Core Repertoire this year are listed below. They are organized, as they will be during Choro Camp, by the rhythm in which they are played.

Acariciando (Abel Ferreira)
Arabiando (Esmeraldino Sales)
De bem com a vida (Luciana Rabello)
Gingando (Dino & Canhoto)
Matuto (Ernesto Nazareth)
Maxixe do Galo (Paulinho da Viola)
Os Oito Batutas (Pixinguinha)
Tua imagem (Canhoto do Paraíba)
Vamos acabar com o baile (Garoto)

Reference recordings

We’ll prepare a youtube playlist of reference recordings of all these tunes and provide a link to it here. Please note that, while the linked performance provides a good reference, our lead sheets and video accompaniments are not transcriptions of them. We encourage you to seek out other recordings and to expect variety in performances of choro.

Lead Sheets

Below, you’ll find links to sheet music for all these tunes in Concert C, Bb and Eb.

Thanks to Marcilio Lopes and Mauro Correa for these charts!

Compilations of Charts:

Video Accompaniments

The members of Água de Moringa, who will be of staff at Choro Camp this year, have prepared 5 different sets of videos for you to work with this year. These have been organized into playlists, as described below.

Playlist 1 provides play-along accompaniments to all the tunes in this year’s Core Repertoire.

The next four playlists are drawn from the same performances as those in Playlist 1, but each one brings a different instrument into focus. These are intended for study by accompanists who play each of these instruments:

Playlist 2 is focused on the cavaquinho accompaniment.
Playlist 3 is focused on the 6-string guitar accompaniment
Playlist 4 is focused on the 7-string guitar accompaniment
Playlist 5 is focused on the pandeiro accompaniment

To get the most out of these videos, be sure to use the slow down features available on YouTube—including the “Custom” slow down feature that provides unlimited control over the speed at which the video plays.

More Resources

We’ll make more resources available here in coming months in support of…

The “Special Topic” classes we’ll be offering this year.
Recommended repertoire for evening camper-led rodas.

Stay tuned!