I saw a clip where a pianist was playing and someone was turning her pages for her, but they fumbled and dropped the sheet music. The pianist kept on playing, but it got me wondering why have the sheet music if she knows the song anyway. Do they really need it? Why can’t they just learn the songs like all bands do?
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I’m a professional working musician who works on both sides of this.
[I actually made a video on this topic 2 years ago](https://youtu.be/Jstow4SmGuA?si=VgxpxQ1pAn3C7HUc) because I was and am so irritated with the state of piano pedagogy and the fact that the culture within pushes people toward memorization… but in the worst possible way that both makes them shittier musicians, and not actually functionally competent to work as musicians.
Pianists like the accompanist you are talking about are doing what I call “active” reading.
It’s just like you reading a book… or this giant wall of text I’m typing. Would it be easier for you to recite this post with it in front of you, or not? Obviously, because you read the language well, it’s far easier for you to read it from the page than to recite it perfectly from memory and would take a lot of preparation to do so.
However, if you just needed to convey the topics on this post to someone more generally and tell them the broad ideas, you could do that without memorizing it and essentially summarize.
Music is a language with its own vocabulary. People who understand that vocabulary can just have a conversation using that vocabulary. They “know how the music goes” and they are using their ear training and their music theory knowledge about functional chord relationships (the grammar of music) to just play.
While written sheet music might have very specific ways of playing certain chords for example, a chord can be “voiced” dozens of ways… think of these voicings as synonyms. You don’t have to use the exact same word to say the idea every time because it has lots of synonyms.
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My beef with memorization is that often classically trained musicians are essentially learning a poem in a foreign language by rote. They learn how to say the words one phoneme at a time, but never learn what they mean. They could never have a conversation in the language or pick up a book to read in that language.
They just move from rote memorizing one poem after the other, can usually only maintain 2-3 at a time, and never learn what anything means.
You, on the other hand, could pick up a book of poems in English and just fucking read and recite them any time you like. Think of how long it would take to memorize a poem in a foreign language by rote… just listening to phonemes. Imagine instead pouring that time into learning basic vocabulary and actually speaking…. and eventually you could just read anything you like and have conversations.
A conversation is just improvisational language. And musicians who understand the musical language can just do that.
That’s what the majority of actual working musicians do. We just show up and read and DON’T have to to put a lot of prep into it. Think of it like trained voice actors. They have the script in front of them every time and mostly are just reading in character pretty solidly on the first take.
Sure, some things need more work and we can always put more polish on really hard stuff, but we can also do an amazing job of just showing up with other musicians and just reading something down for the first time as written and it be pretty solid.
I do that all the time in orchestras, musical theatre pits, chamber ensembles.
But the well rounded of us can literally just show up and read a lead sheet (just chords and melody) that we’ve never seen before and just make shit up for hours both in terms of using “synonyms” for certain chords and have “conversations” on the topic (the key and chord changes).
Those kinds of things are pretty easy to memorize not in terms of the exact notes, but we just “know how it goes” after a while. Any familiar tune you can just sing or audiate the melody of…. and so you could play it IN ANY KEY. You hear the chord changes and you’re just like “Oh yeah, that’s a ii-V-I or I-iv-IV-V” or whatever. It’s a topic you’ve talked about hundreds of times and can just ramble on about all day long.
It’s not arranged in any specific way.
But an orchestra? They are playing pre-arranged music. It needs to be *mostly* what it is on the page to be cohesive.
>Why can’t they just learn the songs like all bands do?
They can. It’s not even hard to memorize particularly… but just like you memorizing my post to recite… it’s fucking extra work. When you CAN read well it’s a lot of extra work to memorize. What people often don’t understand is the sheer volume of music working musicians are keeping up with.
I’m currently learning about 500 pages worth of music for musical theatre gigs in the next month, learn (and arrange in some cases) about 12 pieces for various church services weekly on 3-4 different instruments, will be preparing about 25 vocal solo accompaniments that I’ll likely only have a week or two of heads up on, will be accompanying several choirs, etc. etc… all just within the next month that’s an insane amount of music.
I literally CAN NOT memorize it. (and it’s why people coming from classical backgrounds in piano in particularly are NOT prepared to actually go make a living playing… because they aren’t trained to do this).
It would be like me telling you that you needed to recite the Lord of the Rings this month and they when you actually whip out the books to read from I say, “Why didn’t you just memorize it!?”
Professional musicians have less time to prepare than you might think. In many gigs I’m literally sightreading during the performance… like that is the first time I’m playing the music… with a whole group of other musicians… all collectively following a conductor OR the people in my ensemble.
Most of the musical theatre productions I do we literally have less than a week of rehearsals together and with the actors and there’s a lot to line up. It’s pretty common to have less than a week of lead time in some cases. Really 2 weeks is a huge amount for many things, but frequently musicians are hired in, see the music for the first time right before the concert, make sure the roadmap is good and hit a few tough spots and they are ON…. show time.
Sessions musicians 100% are doing this. When you’re listening to film scores, that’s mostly people damn near sightreading everything. They did get months of prep with the music and certainly not AS an ensemble.
>The pianist kept on playing, but it got me wondering why have the sheet music if she knows the song anyway.
* She’s a good reader who was already reading ahead by a few bars.
* She has to just keep going as has practice doing so as an accompanist.
* Often, if sightreading something particularly dense, accompanists will simplify… that means knowing the language well enough to do so. So in this situation she could keep going and simply a basic chord structure and approximate rhythmic comping pattern.
* She’s probably put some amount of prep in and knows how it goes.
Combine all of that and you can easily keep going for quite a while without the music though I’m sure it would get quite hairy if she didn’t get it back quickly.
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