CARTILHA

Every Tuna group I have ever played in carries the same heirloom: a battered leather binder with photocopies of photocopies, mismatched keys, and somebody's pencil annotations from a 1998 serenade. Half the songs have three versions. The other half are technically lost — the owner of the original score graduated and took the binder home.

Rehearsals run on muscle memory. New members spend a year learning the canon by ear because there is no canonical anything.

Cartilha is the binder, but indexed. Every song is a typed object with a primary score, a per-instrument arrangement, lyrics in three layout modes, and a small history note (when did this enter the repertoire, who taught it, why).

Rehearsal mode collapses the page to one instrument's view, hides everything else, and adds a metronome calibrated by ear from the directing tuno's tap.

Print export composes the binder a Tuna will actually carry: thread-stitched, A5, monochrome on cotton paper. The web version is fast on a phone in the back of a Lisbon café at 23:00.

Adopted by the Estudantina Universitária de Lisboa as the canonical archive in 2025; ~180 songs catalogued, including a dozen recovered from cassette and re-transcribed.

Two other tunas (one in Coimbra, one in Évora) have asked for hosted instances.

The binder still travels to serenades. So does the phone.