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 weak reader (by that I mean, it’ll take me a week to read a single page of music), so take these comments with a grain of salt. I play all my gigs and most of my rehearsals with no sheets. Do I play the song exactly as written? No. Do I play them identically each time? Also, no. I can get away with it because I play an instrument that straddles the line between rhythm and melody. Even in genres where the bass IS the melody, I have the luxury of only providing my bandmates and audience enough recognition so that we all know where we are in the song.
I’ve attended a few auditions for some quasi-orchestral settings. They call it “Concert Band” or “Band” music where classically trained musicians play popular pieces like show tunes and polkas. I auditioned on drums with the Milwaukee Police Band after seeing them butcher a version of Cool & The Gang’s “Celebrate.” I found the whole experience excruciating and threw myself out the door before the conductor could get a good grip on me.
Turns out, they didn’t “butcher” the song. Each musician was playing exactly what was written. I’m accustomed to playing in an interactive way with the other musicians. I couldn’t just jump in and play the song just because I used to dance to it at the disco. If I applied a bit of backbeat, syncopation or crashed a cymbal at the wrong time, the bassist (who was an orchestral cellist) would literally lose his place in the sheet music. Besides, they didn’t rehearse songs the way I was accustomed to. For them, you could toss them a new piece of music and be playing it by the time the conductor swung the baton spectacles/testicles/wallet/watch.
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Bands usually only play a very small amount of music — their own songs. And those songs are typically short and relatively simple with a lot of internal repetition (chorus, bridge, etc.). They’ve played those songs a million times, it’s all memorized. But even then, those people will spend time refreshing their memory for every live tour even if they’ve been doing the same songs for decades, and when they don’t you can tell, hah.
Orchestras play a much larger variety of music that is both longer (some classical pieces can go on for hours!) and much, much more complex. They also often learn and play new pieces with only a bare minimum of time and preparation.
Artists of all varieties memorize various pieces though. Soloists, for example, will almost always memorize whatever piece they are playing as well as memorize pieces that they perform often. See for example: Yoyo Ma who has memorized all umpteen hours of the Bach cello suites.
Lastly: A lot of band musicians have to memorize their work because, well, they don’t read music (standard notation, tabs, or whatever)! This includes some of the very, very best musicians you have ever heard and is not a knock.
FYI: while the musicians don’t have sheet music many bands have a teleprompter for the lead singer on the stage.
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.
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.
As a violinist in an orchestra way back when, I had the actual pieces memorized. What you pay attention to on your sheet music is the notes to self about tempo, mood, emphasis, bow direction reminders, etc.
Aside from what everyone else said, orchestra parts don’t often make very much sense on their own. When you play bass in a band you “understand” the bassline. If you heard only the bass guitar the notes and rhythms would still usually make sense. An orchestra musician’s part might look like “rest for 18 measures, then on the & of 3, play a tremolo for 3/4ths of a count. Then play 12 seemingly random eigth notes. Rest for 5 measures. Sustain an E flat. Pick up a slide whistle.”
Memorizing that would be a lot more of a task.
Bands often play more or less the same music at every concert, while orchestras have short runs of pieces and then go on to something else
It doesn’t make sense to have 100+ people memorize 3 hours of music for a concert they’ll probably play less than 10 times. It does make sense to have 5 people memorize 5 hours of music they’ll play for years
Btw, if you look at concertos, most soloists do memorize their part and play without sheet music, but they can afford to do that because their part is the big important one and they have to practice it a lot before the concert anyway, unlike the rest of the orchestra who can sightread most of the piece perfectly
Think about sheet music/conductor the same way you think about “in ears”
Any professional (band) musician is wearing an in ear monitor, like an earbud, that plays some kind of audio, backing track, pitch guide, or directions from a manager. That’s how they know what’s happening, where they are in the song, what’s next, etc. Plus, there’s generally only one person playing one part that they most likely wrote and they can hear themselves in the monitors.
With an orchestra they’re playing with 30+ other people by ear at the direction of the conductor. They likely didn’t write the music and don’t perform the same songs over and over and over to the point they’ll have them completely memorized.
Someone like Metallica plays the same songs over and over at practice and almost everyday while on a tour. For years and years. Your average orchestra member might get sheet music, practice it a dozen or so times with the group, play a concert (maybe a dozen) then never play that particular song again.
In addition, music generally follows patterns. A melody, a chorus, a breakdown, an interlude, etc. Think of them like blocks. If you know what each block’s pattern is and then you know the pattern of the blocks, you can memorize a song easily. Whereas orchestral music is generally more complicated, precise, and doesn’t always follow an easy pattern. The melody at the beginning may change multiple times throughout the song.
Former opera singer here. Pretty much what everyone has said except that for opera singers playing a role it is classical music and they do memorize the whole damn thing. And guess what? It takes a while but it certainly can be done.
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