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

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

A band will play the same dozen or so songs thousands of times together, whereas a professional musician will be given a song to learn in a few days or weeks and be expected to perform it along with a hundred people they’ve mostly never played with.

It’s like the difference between reciting your own speech that you wrote and prepared, versus being required to recite the Communist Manifesto ver batum on stage tomorrow.

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