Choral educators often urge their singers not to show it on their faces when they mistake. The idea is that, if we don’t show that we made the error, most of the audience might not know.
I think the truth is even better than that.
I think that an audience member, seeing a choir committing to the performance, working hard and enjoying the work, will hear but forgive an errors.
It’s not a question of pulling the wool over the ears of the audience. It’s a question of building a joyful, committed performance that invites the audience into a creative space.
In that space, small errors don’t matter. So they’re easy to forgive.