Why can bands play for hours often utilizing different instruments without ever looking at sheet music, but orchestra musicians always read from sheet music?

Question

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?

In: 5311

Answer 1

You play with a band with like 4 people, and you can adjust your timing, or the notes as needed, filling in the beats, etc. You get in a groove, part of the allure is adhoc mistakes/jamming. You want it to be organic.

You play with 60-70, hell even 100 people in a symphony, and you cant do that, not just because you will sound like utter chaos, but because the sound itself doesnt travel to you in tandem, since sound travels at a finite speed, thus a conductor in the middle keeping everyone in time. Also you want to hear the music as the composer intended, you dont want to hear someone elses version of it.

I see people saying you dont get time to practice in some of these, and thats insane, we played pieces, over and over and over and over in orchestra’s, but in bands we had a few songs we’d play forever sure, but mostly it was just a few times then go, who cares if it differs a little between playing (also it was always the drummers fault anyway).