Don’t they practice? is the conductor really necessary?
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A) Even if a rock band has tons of different songs, a lot of the instrumentation will fall into similar patterns; they’re “felt” more than they’re “read”. Orchestral compositions are more “read and interpreted”. This is why you often see live bands at late night talk shows or birthday parties who get asked if they can play this popular song they’ve never performed before, and they say, “sure I can play that”. As long as they know the key and the general feel of the song, they can make something pretty similar that sounds about right.
B) Rock and Roll gained traction in the 50s. Orchestral compositions can date all the way back to the 1500s. A classical violinist has centuries of compositional styles from different time periods like renaissance, baroque, romantic era, 20th century. Palestrina alone has made hundreds of compositions. Imagine having to know every composition, from every composer, across every time period for the past 500 years.
C) Improvisation is generally frowned upon in orchestras.
D) For a lot of rock music, each individual part generally “makes sense” on its own. You’ll probably be playing for the entire song, and the musical phrases will just feel right to you. An individual part in an orchestral composition can oftentimes be “Tacet for forty-three measures. Then play some random nonsense notes. Tacet for another thirty measures. Complicated string of sixteenth notes that don’t make any melodic sense to you.” Stuff that makes sense when you’re practicing all together, but practiced individually just involves a lot of counting. Stuff that’s way harder to memorize.
E) Orchestral compositions are often much longer than 3 minutes.
F) Orchestras do way less crowd work, so they *can* read sheet music. A soloist in a concerto, for example, oftentimes has to memorize their solos because they’re up front, performing in the audience’s faces.
G) Orchestras write their own parts way less often than bands come up with their own parts.
H) How you play and express each note has to be the same as everyone else in your section. Orchestras predated amplified music, and to get the sound to really resonate cleanly, you had to have everyone playing the same thing, in the same way. Rock bands seldom have this problem.
I) As for why they need a conductor, the conductor is the one who takes all the individual performances and shapes it into one unified vision. If you watch any professional conductor, they’re super expressive. They’re not just marking the rhythm of the piece, but how each part is played–smoothly, harshly, slowly increasing in volume, sharp decline. If you watch them during rehearsals, they’re in the center, listening to each part and how it plays with the whole. They’ll tell the horns to enter a little more quietly, the strings play their staccato notes more roughly, etc. They dictate how they want the piece to be interpreted.
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