Don’t they practice? is the conductor really necessary?
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Conductor here… I should also say that I’ve played my fair share of pop/rock bands (there’s a story of going on a rock tour and saying to the audience “anyone got a couch we can sleep on tonight?!” I’ve done those tours. Stayed with some weird ass people… ANYWAY.) Orchestras are intended to play music from any composer. Composers (at least Western Classical composers) are OG rock stars. They had massive egos, fan base, sexual craziness, addictions, many of them were smart asses to political leaders (and got away with it) and many of them died young of their vices. The musicians in an orchestra can play music from any composer. Even modern rock bands often hire orchestras. I’ve seen Metallica arrange parts for a 40 piece orchestra and it’s awesome!
In some cases the conductor is needed for the artistic vision, but I’ve been in groups (as the musician) where the conductor will show us how horrible they are and no, we don’t watch them. As a conductor, the scariest part is when 40 amazing musicians look at you and collectively think “oh, you’re not half bad, we may watch you” and then the pressure is on!!
Rock bands play their own music. I’ve been in rock bands where the group leader will say “your part goes like this: ___” and play it and I have to figure out my part by ear. It takes FOR. EV .ER. Which is why groups eventually gravitate towards written music. Most rock musicians don’t start out reading, but it gets really old taking a week to get one song together when you can pay an arranger a couple hundred bucks and they’ll write it out for you and you can read it for studio work and then memorize for your tour and forget it when you’re done. Most professional orchestras get maybe one rehearsal before a performance. Movie soundtracks are often recorded the first time the musicians see the music! Sometimes you can hear mistakes and it’s funny (to me). That doesn’t happen as much with new movies because of modern recording techniques.
Some orchestras do eventually memorize their shows. Trans Siberian Orchestra, you bet your ass they got their book memorized. Any Broadway musical, they’ll eventually have it memorized. It’s like a right of passage “Hey Bob, you still want your book tonight?” “Sigh…. No, probably don’t.” That help?
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.
Wow. While there are some gold nuggets in this thread, there’s a lot of misinformation here. As a former orchestral musician, here’s my take.
Orchestras perform from sheet music primarily because of the quantity and complexity of music an orchestra is expected to perform.
Quantity – A rock band may have a repertoire of a few hours of music they may perform on any given tour while an orchestral musician will be called to perform tens or hundreds of hours of unique pieces of music in an orchestral season. Plus, these same musicians will be performing tons of other music in lots of different settings (solo, small group, other orchestras, etc.) during that same time frame.
Complexity – In general, rock/pop music has a measure of uniformity in its construction. Songs tend to work in alternating verse/chorus form, with repetition that reduces the amount a musician needs to memorize. There are exceptions, of course, but it’s generally true. In contrast, an orchestral work from Mahler or Stravinsky is very complex in its form and may have similar sections but will have very little actial repetition. It’s also generally more complex in musical language (tonality, rhythm, dynamics, etc.). Add to that the complexity involved with having 100+ musicians playing 30+ unique parts vs. a much smaller group in rock. Sheet music helps all those people stay on the same page (literally) about what they are trying to accomplish at any moment.
Conductors are important to orchestras for several reasons including helping the musicians manage complexity (keeping them together), balancing the orchestra’s sound in real time (especially as it relates to adjusting the volume of each instrument when necessary), setting and adjusting the tempo, and most importantly providing an interpretation of the piece that is common to all performers for that performance. It may help if you think of the conductor as the person who plays the orchestra. Early orchestras didn’t have conductors. The music they played was less complex, so they were generally led by a member of the ensemble. Some modern early music ensembles that play that repertoire still follow that tradition. In general, though, it would be very difficult to perform orchestral literature from the 19th century on without an actual conductor.
You didn’t ask about why orchestral music is expensive and why people don’t just print their own, but it was a big topic in the posts I read, so I want to touch on that too. Orchestral musicians don’t play from scores. They play from individual parts (1st violin, 2nd clarinet, 4th horn, etc.), and there are never more than 2 muscians playing from a single stand of music. This means that a set of parts for an orchestral piece can run to hundreds (or even thousands) of printed pages. The editions created by publishing houses account for the fact that the parts will be bound and need manageable page breaks. I’ve performed from home-printed music before, and individual unbound pieces of paper are really difficult to manage during a performance. Add to this the fact that orchestral parts are usually printed on much larger size stock, and self-printing or copying parts becomes expensive and/or impractical. Most importantly, generally speaking, orchestral works aren’t available anywhere to self-print. Most of them predate notation software, and it would take way, way more time and effort to get them in a printable form than anybody, anywhere would be willing to pay for. Yes, the music itself is public domain, but no one has an incentive to make an open source or generic version available. The reason the cost of orchestral music is so high is that publishing houses put an extraordinary amount of effort into making plates for every part for each piece in their library – dozens or scores of individual pages for dozens or scores of unique parts for each piece. And these aren’t high volume items – many pieces only get played a handful of times (or less) around the world in a year. The economics involved in the printing, selling, maintaining, storing, and renting of orchestral music are not great. It’s a miracle that so much music is actually available to groups.
By the way, there are instances where orchestral musicians play without conductors and without printed music. Often times small professional ensembles (string quartets, brass quintets, etc.) perform in a style that looks more like what you see in a rock concert – more physical movement, more visible interaction between performers, more individual control of the experience and more adjustments during the performance, more audience engagement. When this happens, they generally are performing a smaller repertoire with a smaller number of people, very much like rock bands.
This went way longer than I intended, but I hope it helps. .
Edit: This really blew up overnight. I’ve never had a post get this many likes. Thank you all for your awards and up-votes. Thank you even more for your interest in a subject area I love deeply. I never would have thought a thread on orchestral music would garner this much attention. I responded to a few commenters, but not all. It’s great to see so many wonderful perspectives being voiced here. Thank you!
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