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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As a musician familiar in both worlds, the real reason is that orchestras give their musicians very very very little time to rehearse/prepare (which is why you have to be ***extremely fucking good*** to be in one, you have to sight read like an absolute demon), so they may only have had one or two rehearsals as a group prior to performing, and maybe a week or two of preparation/practice on their own.
Popular music acts are playing music they wrote and have had months to familiarize themselves with. If you played the same thing for six months straight you’ll have it memorized within about six weeks at the most (and that’s for something pretty complicated).
One thing I’ll note is that people are saying classical/orchestral music is more complex, and popular music has a good amount of improvisation. While this is certainly true on average, it varies heavily by genre. One, you don’t get to improvise much in modern pop music (i.e., The Weeknd, Bruno Mars, whatever). You don’t hear improvised guitar solos in Ariana Grande songs, yet none of them are reading from sheet music. In their case, the music isn’t particularly complex, so memorization isn’t as much of a barrier.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have extremely complex rock/metal/jazz/whatever where the musicians still have it memorized and don’t read from sheet music on stage despite its complexity. [Jazz fusion is one of the more show-off-y versions of this.](https://youtube.com/shorts/vmWRjZd-j1w?si=Sew6WawZyXH64YWm) Memorization is certainly a barrier here, so it’s probably no surprise to hear all those guys have graduate degrees in music.
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