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

1. Bands can get away with mistakes, and will get cheers if they trainwreck. Orchestras can’t get away with the same kind of mistakes, and they won’t be cheered for them either.

2. Bands are allowed and encouraged to improvise and rearrange. Orchestras are almost always required to stick to the exact written piece and the instructions of the conductor.

3. Bands have a set list of songs that last 5 minutes each that they always get to play, and the whole catalog of music is often a range of 50-70 years. Orchestras have a very huge catalog of music to draw from spanning more than a hundred years.

4. Bands get to practice their own compositions and the greatest hits. Orchestras May be required to play anything from pop tunes to Renaissance music to John Williams to avante garde music most people don’t even know exist.

5. Band music typically have relatively simple arrangements and predictable chord progressions (with most pop and rock songs using the same exact chords), and require few members. Orchestral music tend to be very highly melodic and very dense and can involve even up to a hundred people, and pieces can last up to half an hour each.

6. Bands do use sheet music as well, especially for longer, more exact pieces, and when playing pieces that are outside their usual set list. Orchestra players, especially soloists, sometimes don’t use sheet music because they have memorized certain pieces by heart, and sheet music acts more as references than literally something they read each note off just to play.

7. There’s so much band music that sound the same that you can play something different but come close enough, or intuitively predict what comes next. There’s so much orchestral music and very long pieces that it is easier to forget certain more complex passages or certain phrase variations or taking the conductors instructions into account that you need to look at a reference to make sure you’re going to play the right stuff.