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
I am a drummer in a metal band and I agree with a lot of what people have already commented. I have all the songs memorized so I don’t really need sheet music. Hell, I can’t even read sheet music that good haha… I’ve played the songs so much that they’re basically stuck in my muscle memory at this point. I can go without playing them for months and when I finally sit down and play them again I can play them just as good as I usually do. Because we write our own songs I also already know much of them before I even start to rehearse them. I usually already know about 50% to 75% of a track on the first rehearsal. The rehearsals are mostly just to dial in those more complex fills and rhythms (melodies and solos for the other members of guess). This makes rehearsals really easy. On average it takes me about 2-3 days to rehearse a full 45 minute set. Aaaaaaaand I have the option to improvise a lot. Fills can change constantly from day to day depending on the energy on stage.
This depends on the band but we rarely rehearse together. We usually learn the songs in our own time and then a couple of weeks before a tour we get together and do a big production rehearsal. Usually over a weekend. At that point we already play the songs perfectly together and are just trying to get all the stuff around us to sync, like lights, mixing, backing tracks (sorry to break that bubble for you but A LOT of bands rely on Backing tracks, like, A FUCKING LOT), logistics and so on.
I don’t know much about orchestras but I would imagine it’s like most people have already said. The players don’t get much time to familiarize themselves with the music and arrangement. They probably only get a couple of days to actually rehearse completely new material, which is also pretty darn conplex. So they need that extra help to remember the parts while they play. Sure, I would bet that some orchestra player do memorize a full concert but even then, it’s a good thing to have that sheet music readily available if you happen to get a brain fart and forget parts while playing.
>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.
Everyone already gave you some good answers, but no one is really addressing this point in particular.
Basically, there’s not a binary of “memorized/not-memorized.” There’s a big spectrum from “completely unfamiliar with the piece, reading off the sheet” and “know every note by heart.” Maybe you don’t know every single note but you can approximate it without the music. Maybe you do know the whole piece, but you aren’t 100% confident in your ability to recall it under pressure in a performance setting, so you want the sheet music as a safety net.
As a pianist it’s kind of strange/inscrutable what happens in my head when I read music to a piece that I already know well. If I had a piece memorized but it’s been a while since I played it, then I often can’t remember what comes next, until I just *glance* at the sheet music. I’m definitely not looking in enough detail to consciously read every note, but somehow just seeing the contours of the lines, or whatever, reminds my brain of enough to be able to play everything.
Point being, memorization is kind of a spectrum. It’s not as simple as a yes/no “do you know it or not.” And generally, no one wants to perform anything from memory until they are on the 100% “yes, I know it” side of that spectrum.
My parents neighbor plays in the National Philharmonic and for most concerts plays the piece for the first time live on stage from the sheet.
Only the main series elite concerts or special events (a big composer or new difficult piece that will be recorded live) has a rehearsal. Single.
They have mastered the craft, they don’t need to learn a piece to perform it, but as they cannot remember so much single instance pieces it makes much greater sense to be an expert reader rather than memorizer.
A lot of the responses have made the points that classical orchestras don’t get much rehearsal time for the amount of music they play, and that popular music has more improvisation in it. But an even bigger reason is that popular songs inherently have a lot more repetition than classical music. Lots of songs are built around one or two repeating sections that consist of a repeated 3- or 4-chord loop. Almost no classical music does this, and when it does repeat, it’s at the larger section level, so there are many more notes to remember
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).
She wanted the reference. A good piano player probably knows most of the notes and remembers most of it. The music is for reference on the parts that they don’t know as well.
Someone really familiar with the music may notice that she missed a part.
From a vocalists perspective, I sang with a group that memorized Everything and probably knew a couple hundred songs. That didn’t mean that everyone knew all of them, it just meant that enough people could remember the words to keep going. From a music perspective, most people could guess the notes for their part or pitch match the people next to them well enough to fill in (for example: you forget the words or don’t know the song, but the next word is Today. You can probably join in on the Ay sound even though you missed the constants.)
Best I can compare it to outside of music is cooking. I pretty much know the recipe to a few dishes (apple pie, ratio for bread, etc.) I don’t NEED the recipe, but without it I might forget a minor ingredient or add too much of one.
Short answer, rehearsal. Bands rehearse alot more than orchestras.
Longer answer : chord charts and song similarly.
I used to be the guitar/singer for a blues band that also dabbled in bluegrass and rocknroll. We had about an 80 song repitoire. At the drop of a hat, my band could play just about any of those 80 songs.
However, about 30 of those songs had identical chord structures. A song that uses A, D, and E as it’s chords and a song that uses E, A, and B are more or less identical. They both are 1,4,5 songs. At the very least, these songs are parallel.
Then of our 80 song repitoire, about 20 more were also identical as far as chord structure, just not the same structure as a 1,4,5 song.
So, of our 80 song repitoire, over half of them could be played by learning just 2 chord structures (and knowing those chord structures in multiple keys). Lots of 1,4,5 songs, and lots of 1,4,5,7 songs.
I’d say only 15-20 of our songs were “unique” in that they didn’t really follow a pattern similar to anything else we played. One example would be the song House of the Rising Sun. It’s an easy song to play. But it’s not a “typical” chord structure or at least not one you see that often.
This is why I always tell students to learn how to play a blues song first because you will have actually learned thousands of songs by learning that one song, just need to learn new lyrics.
But if you spend 20 hours learning Classical Gas as your first song… Well that’s great, but now you can only play classical gas and that’s it.
Learn a single blues song and you have learned most of the genre and it also sets you up with a nice foundation for learning other genres.
Fun fact: even ancient pythagoreans used primarily the 1,4, and 5 chords. So while this does apply to blues, it is not unique to blues. All music relies heavily on those 3 chords. That’s why they are called the Major chords as opposed to the minor chords.
I’m a professional working musician who works on both sides of this.
[I actually made a video on this topic 2 years ago](https://youtu.be/Jstow4SmGuA?si=VgxpxQ1pAn3C7HUc) because I was and am so irritated with the state of piano pedagogy and the fact that the culture within pushes people toward memorization… but in the worst possible way that both makes them shittier musicians, and not actually functionally competent to work as musicians.
Pianists like the accompanist you are talking about are doing what I call “active” reading.
It’s just like you reading a book… or this giant wall of text I’m typing. Would it be easier for you to recite this post with it in front of you, or not? Obviously, because you read the language well, it’s far easier for you to read it from the page than to recite it perfectly from memory and would take a lot of preparation to do so.
However, if you just needed to convey the topics on this post to someone more generally and tell them the broad ideas, you could do that without memorizing it and essentially summarize.
Music is a language with its own vocabulary. People who understand that vocabulary can just have a conversation using that vocabulary. They “know how the music goes” and they are using their ear training and their music theory knowledge about functional chord relationships (the grammar of music) to just play.
While written sheet music might have very specific ways of playing certain chords for example, a chord can be “voiced” dozens of ways… think of these voicings as synonyms. You don’t have to use the exact same word to say the idea every time because it has lots of synonyms.
—
My beef with memorization is that often classically trained musicians are essentially learning a poem in a foreign language by rote. They learn how to say the words one phoneme at a time, but never learn what they mean. They could never have a conversation in the language or pick up a book to read in that language.
They just move from rote memorizing one poem after the other, can usually only maintain 2-3 at a time, and never learn what anything means.
You, on the other hand, could pick up a book of poems in English and just fucking read and recite them any time you like. Think of how long it would take to memorize a poem in a foreign language by rote… just listening to phonemes. Imagine instead pouring that time into learning basic vocabulary and actually speaking…. and eventually you could just read anything you like and have conversations.
A conversation is just improvisational language. And musicians who understand the musical language can just do that.
That’s what the majority of actual working musicians do. We just show up and read and DON’T have to to put a lot of prep into it. Think of it like trained voice actors. They have the script in front of them every time and mostly are just reading in character pretty solidly on the first take.
Sure, some things need more work and we can always put more polish on really hard stuff, but we can also do an amazing job of just showing up with other musicians and just reading something down for the first time as written and it be pretty solid.
I do that all the time in orchestras, musical theatre pits, chamber ensembles.
But the well rounded of us can literally just show up and read a lead sheet (just chords and melody) that we’ve never seen before and just make shit up for hours both in terms of using “synonyms” for certain chords and have “conversations” on the topic (the key and chord changes).
Those kinds of things are pretty easy to memorize not in terms of the exact notes, but we just “know how it goes” after a while. Any familiar tune you can just sing or audiate the melody of…. and so you could play it IN ANY KEY. You hear the chord changes and you’re just like “Oh yeah, that’s a ii-V-I or I-iv-IV-V” or whatever. It’s a topic you’ve talked about hundreds of times and can just ramble on about all day long.
It’s not arranged in any specific way.
But an orchestra? They are playing pre-arranged music. It needs to be *mostly* what it is on the page to be cohesive.
>Why can’t they just learn the songs like all bands do?
They can. It’s not even hard to memorize particularly… but just like you memorizing my post to recite… it’s fucking extra work. When you CAN read well it’s a lot of extra work to memorize. What people often don’t understand is the sheer volume of music working musicians are keeping up with.
I’m currently learning about 500 pages worth of music for musical theatre gigs in the next month, learn (and arrange in some cases) about 12 pieces for various church services weekly on 3-4 different instruments, will be preparing about 25 vocal solo accompaniments that I’ll likely only have a week or two of heads up on, will be accompanying several choirs, etc. etc… all just within the next month that’s an insane amount of music.
I literally CAN NOT memorize it. (and it’s why people coming from classical backgrounds in piano in particularly are NOT prepared to actually go make a living playing… because they aren’t trained to do this).
It would be like me telling you that you needed to recite the Lord of the Rings this month and they when you actually whip out the books to read from I say, “Why didn’t you just memorize it!?”
Professional musicians have less time to prepare than you might think. In many gigs I’m literally sightreading during the performance… like that is the first time I’m playing the music… with a whole group of other musicians… all collectively following a conductor OR the people in my ensemble.
Most of the musical theatre productions I do we literally have less than a week of rehearsals together and with the actors and there’s a lot to line up. It’s pretty common to have less than a week of lead time in some cases. Really 2 weeks is a huge amount for many things, but frequently musicians are hired in, see the music for the first time right before the concert, make sure the roadmap is good and hit a few tough spots and they are ON…. show time.
Sessions musicians 100% are doing this. When you’re listening to film scores, that’s mostly people damn near sightreading everything. They did get months of prep with the music and certainly not AS an ensemble.
>The pianist kept on playing, but it got me wondering why have the sheet music if she knows the song anyway.
* She’s a good reader who was already reading ahead by a few bars.
* She has to just keep going as has practice doing so as an accompanist.
* Often, if sightreading something particularly dense, accompanists will simplify… that means knowing the language well enough to do so. So in this situation she could keep going and simply a basic chord structure and approximate rhythmic comping pattern.
* She’s probably put some amount of prep in and knows how it goes.
Combine all of that and you can easily keep going for quite a while without the music though I’m sure it would get quite hairy if she didn’t get it back quickly.
Popular music acts likely don’t use sheet music because they’ve never *created* sheet music to begin with. They write down the lyrics, they might also write down the chords they are using on their guitars, but the songs themselves are in their minds through rote performance.
A lot of professional bands *don’t even know how to read and write music to begin with.* They literally compose the music they create on the instruments as they go.
Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, and Bob Dylan never learned how to read musical notation, for example.
Musician here (with experience in both a band and an orchestra),
Bands often play a similar set wherever they go, so naturally they have more time to learn a song without relying on sheets. They are also (usually) much more loose when it comes to the arrangement of the music, and having fewer musicians means it’s easier to just agree what they’re playing and how it should be played.
Orchestras tend to change their material much more often, meaning they use sheet music as a quicker way of getting everyone up to speed – especially important since they’re often larger ensembles than bands and can’t communicate with each musician as easily as a band. Orchestral music is also pretty intricate, so knowing exactly what you’re supposed to do (as well as a reference for following the conductor) is often required. People usually expect orchestras to play the piece exactly right, whereas bands are more free to make changes to the arrangement.
Latest Answers