We’ve just been to a proper concert for the first time in ages – a string quartet performance of Vivaldi/ Four Seasons and some other pieces. Very enjoyable.
Anyway, whilst enjoying the recital, I was wondering why classical musicians always use sheet music, yet a rock band / jazz band / etc always play from memory ?
My first thought was that classical was more complex and so more difficult to memorise, but thinking about it, surely something by Coltrane is just a complex as something by Mr Bach ? So is it that a rock / jazz outfit would heavily rehearse a particular set – but then a classical ensemble have played these pieces many many times ?
The only thing I can think is that classical is expected to be more “precise” in that each instrument is only part of the overall piece and can’t afford to improvise in any way. But then again a guitar is only part of the overall pieces.
So do they really just read note by note and play or is there some memory also ? Is the sheet music just for show in that the audience expects it to be there as it always has been………
Like a say, a dumb question from a non musician (my musical ability extends to pressing the play button on my CD player).
It’s a matter of training, mostly.
Classical players are trained to follow a score exactly. The notes are all written down and must be played as written, with differences of emphasis, timing etc. as the conductor or ensemble leader sees fit.
A lot of jazz musicians also work with written music actually, because lots of them have had formal training. The jazz players at my local pub always have sheet music because there is usually a guest musician or two with compositions of their own that the house band will not necessarily know well. The typical repertoire of jazz standards, the ones jazz players cut their teeth on, are not all that get played.
Of course there are still some great musicians who have never learned to read a score. The amazing Oscar Peterson, for example. He was gifted with perfect pitch and an innate sense of harmony. He could hear something and not only be able to play it back instantly but could improvise upon it immediately too, in a variety of styles.
Rock and pop musicians don’t really need sheet music when performing because with rock or pop pieces, feel and practice are easily enough. Although when rock musicians add contract string sections etc. for gigs, the extra players may well be reading from written arrangements in lieu of lengthy and expensive rehearsal time.
Oscar was fully classically trained too of course. He could play anything.
Jazzers do a lot of improvising of course, much of which is not just blowing but skillful reharmonising of the chords and melodies which is why jazz sounds like jazz not like rock musicians blowing over 3 chords. And players like Coltrane practiced constantly, even learning new ways to breath, to produce so many notes.
You want a lotta notes? Art Tatum’s your man. The beast with twenty fingers.
As those of us who grew up in the 70s know, more notes is better.
I think we can agree that Yngwie Malmsteen is the greatest musician of our time.
I’m sure Yngwie does.
Increasing numbers of singers need access to their words, written down or on a i-pad, these days, I note.
I saw Andy Findon with Home Service at Derby Folk Festival a few years ago, he’d set off from London stopped at some services for a coffee realised he’d left his ipad with all the music on back at home. He had to turn round go back and get the ipad so he could play the concert.
What about Kraftwerk? One night the whole concert consisted of buffering.
You, funny man.
When Gryphon reformed a few years back, they were all reading off iPads. Must confess, it did distract a bit, but then again, it must be hard remembering after a 40 year gap.
I think that it was just the wind section reading the ipads, that Andy Findon being one of them.
oooh no. At Union Chapel they were all over the stage.
Folk bands often have one member, often the bassist or drummer, with charts or iPads/laptops, it often being because that member is depping, new or flown in for a special gig. Like jazzers, many folkies are involved in multiple groupings simultaneously.
Phew. So nothing to do with advancing age, then.
Course not!
Everyone knows folk is a youngster zone: nobody above 25 sings or watches it. Much like jazz.
Just checked and you are correct my Cheshired friend.
Pete Townsend has used a comfort monitor for his chords since the late 80s. You’d think he’d have known them by now.
You’ll often find with classical music *soloists* that they at least will know their parts from memory. I’ve seen Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance, played in this way. Orchestras are best compared to 1930s-50s dance bands – large ensembles (in which this or that member will likely be unavailable/depped-for from one gig to the next) playing selections from a large / changing repertoire of music, as opposed to a rock or even jazz band playing a more limited repertoire and on many more occasions in a row. So having the sheet music is valuable for those two reasons – that it is a temporary item to be played, usually on one concert (not a tour of 30 nights of the same repertoire); and that even if it is played on more than one concert, the ensemble membership may have slightly changed (as opposed to a rock band which is *only* a set membership of individuals, who do nothing but play the same 20 songs all year).
Part of it is convention. Occasionally there’ll be a solo recital where the pianist is going to perform “from memory” or without a score, but it’s not the norm.
Similarly, actors learn their lines, but authors will read with their books in hand.
Honestly? There’s more notes. Pop music and “classical” music aren’t really that comparable as artforms. One movement of a symphony might last 20 minutes, and each player might play a couple of hundred notes in that time.
Most pop and rock songs are made up of block chords (rather than single notes), in 2 or 3 simple sequences of about between 2-6 chords, repeated again and again. Or else they’re dependent on a mixture of chord sequences and riffs, which again by their nature are highly repetitive. The relationships between those chords and notes are, also, highly predictable. The vast majority of solos are improvised, and/or played around a (relatively, compared to “classical”) unsophisticated and simple musical vocabulary. (Obviously there are exceptions, with stunt guitarists etc.)
Musical complexity is not a feature of pop. That’s not a value judgement: it’s a fact. Pop and rock are simple. That’s part of the appeal.
TLDR: there’s much, much more music in a classical piece. Physically more. And it’s much more complicated. That’s why it’s harder to learn it by heart.
More notes in classical? Bo77ocks. I refer you to 1 minute and 52 seconds into this, and then again, even more so, from 2 minutes 43 seconds et seq:
Dang. Wish I hadn’t written “obviously there are exceptions” in that pesky white font. 😉
You failed, however, to mention stunt banjoists, stunt fiddlers or stunt mandolin players….
I honestly think that a lot of non-classical musicians , especially singers, have music stands these days because they don’t want eye-contact with the audience. Paul Heaton has been avoiding eye contact with anyone once he’s on stage for his entire career. Now it gives him the perfect excuse. “Look, it’s in case I forget the words… to this song I’ve sung hundreds of times over the last 30 years”
Also so many of them are really bloody old.
Watching a few Goldfrapp performances on ver ‘Tube, I noticed that Alison was using a screen by her feet, apparently for the lyrics. One of these was an early performance of tracks from ‘Tales of Us’. Now, I love Goldfrapp, but I wondered whether the screen was showing the right lyrics, or ‘drzzfbbllldrowftingdeeepersfnnllll’ which she is inclined to do at times.
You never see an orchestra come back on for an encore and jam, do you? Lazy bastards.
Encore – yes, quite often. Jam? Not so much….
To be fair, Nigel Kennedy was, even back in his first Four Seasons with CBSO. Always Hendrix, even then.
A lot of notes, a lot of tempos – and no conductor:
It’s very common for smaller classical ensembles to play without a conductor. Don’t really need one unless it’s a full-blown orchestra or they’re playing something fiendishly complicated.
When Frank Zappa was rehearsing his band on new or unfamiliar material, there was sheet music with all the parts written out. Once the musicians had learned the music thoroughly in rehearsal, he might change things around. Sometimes in mid-performance. No sheet music onstage, though.
I read somewhere that on his final band tour in ’88, the band were required to be familiar with 120 different compositions or part-compositions, because he liked to change the sets around from gig to gig to make things more interesting.
Yet all that rehearsing seems to have pissed off the band. The rehearsals for Zappa’s last tour lasted longer than the actual tour.
78 concerts in all, between February and June.
36 in the USA and Canada, 42 in Europe.
The band finally mutinied towards the end of their European tour. After their concert in Genoa, the brass and reed players, the drummer and the percussionist all demanded that the bassist, who was also the designated concert master for rehearsals, be replaced as they all hated him.
Zappa fired the entire band and cancelled the rest of the tour including the upcoming second USA leg, vowing never to tour with a band again.
The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life and Make a Jazz Noise are both from that tour, right? They’re both excellent. Was Broadway the Hard Way recorded with the same band? It’s not so excellent.
Yes it was. All live material, carefully edited together into a themed collection. Personally, I like it a little bit more than Make A Jazz Noise Here.
There are also bits and bobs from that tour within the You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore double archive sets.
As a classical musician you are not playing all the time. You may have dozens of empty bars where you are not playing anything. You need to follow the score so that you are ready to come in when called by the conductor. There are also instructions on how to play in the score, very loud, very soft, staccato etc. This is part of the whole piece and must be followed very carefully otherwise the whole collaboration with dozens of other musicians won’t work properly.
My brother-in-law was a professional flautist who played for many years in the English National Opera orchestra. In Wagner’s Ring Cycle he used to take car mags into the pit to keep him awake during the long hours when he didn’t have anything to do. The brass players used to decamp to the pub next door – there was a bell to summon them back when they were needed.
My friend Rick is a drummer and drum teacher who reads music. He worked in the orchestra pit for various West End musicals for 30-odd years. Mainly on Blood Brothers. He used to take a book with him every night or even have a snooze when he wasn’t required to play for a while.
Just remembered that I introduced the b-in-l to Gavin Lyall at this time, and he worked his way through his oeuvre too.
Once Amazon takes over the orchestras they’ll put a stop to all that inefficiency. Musicians will be tagged and paid by note. In the quiet periods they can work on side projects. Innovation!
Some classical musicians must have phenomenal memories. I guess, with enough practice, it becomes automatic – muscle memory.
To add to what others have said, another difference is the sheer volume of different music most classical musicians play. Most orchestras will play a different programme every week, rehearsing for three or four days before two or three performances – and then on to the next one. So even with a piece they’ll be likely to have played many times – Tchaikovsky or Beethoven 5th symphonies for example – they won’t generally have every note in their fingers.
Rock musicians only need to know three things – Louie Louie, Whipping Post and Toad.
And which one of those they’re supposed to be playing, of course.
In the epilogue of But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer, the best ever book about music, he describes the lot of a jazz musician in the USA in the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. The mostly black musicians were taught to play by ear. Very few learnt how to read music. They only made a living playing live. Very few made money from record sales. As a result , they’d play three sets a day, often with different musicians. Everyone knew ‘the tunes’, of course, but improvisation was the keystone of their performances. As a result, they had to listen to each other and respond. ‘Feel’ was essential. And practice. Thousands of hours of practice. John Coltrane, for example, was almost never seen without his saxophone in his hand.
Miles Davis was an exception. His father was a dentist and well off enough to send him to Julliard. However, he really learnt his craft in the clubs of New York at the elbow of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
I do recommend But Beautiful. The writing is sumptuous.
Seconded.
My pro flautist brother-in-law mentioned above was a classical musician to his fingertips – he could play anything by sight and often did recording sessions where he would just turn up and play.
But he was totally awestruck by my ability to improvise on piano or guitar, however rudimentary it might have been. He had absolutely no idea how to go about it.
I have a colleague who is a superb pianist. Remove the sheet music and she’s totally lost. She once tried to tackle Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. The long space for improvisation completely floored her.
This has been my overwhelming experience. Classically trained musos are surprisingly ill-equipped to jam or improvise in any way, and they have a very non-practical understanding of music theory. It was also interesting with my kids seeing the difference in how piano and guitar are taught. Guitar has an emphasis on improvisation (and dare I say, enjoyment!) from the start, even with something as simple as strumming. Piano, and most other classical instruments, are about notes on the page and accuracy.
Then again, putting sheet music in front of most guitarists shuts them up pretty quick.
My piano teacher explained reading music to me as being like using a map for a journey. Lots of it you know by heart and don’t need to closely read it, you just track progress against it. But occasionally there’s a tricky bit where you check which roundabout is left then right, which junction you need to keep left etc. In practice classical musicians do know a lot by heart, and use the music so as to play it perfectly.
It’s quite rare that writing about popular music of all kinds talks about how much musicians know about music. The ability to read notation is only one part of it, there is also all of the other knowledge of harmony, scales, rhythm and so on. Here’s someone who tries to work out what the Beatles knew. The answer seems to be they didn’t know how to read or write music, but did know quite a lot about how music works, even if they didn’t use standard terminology.
Surely this is the best option? To have an innate understanding of melody and harmony without needing the prop of formal music theory? All that formal theory is doing is trying to codify this nebulous concept of what sounds ‘good’.
They didn’t know how you were supposed to do it so they did it wrong sometimes, which made it great, but they had to be exceptional to acheive that. They cut out the middleman, the composer was the performer. That’s them on the recording.
Haven’t listened to this yet, but it all starts with chords, surely? The first thing anybody does when picking up a guitar for the first time (apart from trying to pick out Apache, obviously) is learn a few chords. Once C, Am, F, G7 and their equivalents in other keys have been mastered, you can strum along with most basic pop music. More complicated tunes lead to deeper knowledge. The Beatles were playing Till There Was You and A Taste of Honey pretty early on, and will have had to work out and learn the chords. The A-minor/C-aug/C-major sequence from A Taste of Honey later turns up All My Loving. I doubt that came out of nowhere.
Of course JohnPaulGeorge were instinctive musicians who brought considerable genius to the party, and working for all those years with George Martin must have helped. But I doubt whether being able to put musicological labels to what they were doing would have done.
There was a radio doco about 25 years ago that covered the same ground, saying that the Beatles were like car mechanics. With their early Hamburg days, they’d played so many covers that they’d “stripped the engine down” & learnt how to construct a song through practice.
It was the critics that started analysing early Beatles songs & commenting on their structure (aeolian cadences) “To this day I don’t have any idea what they are. They sound like exotic birds” whereas they were just going on instinct, feel & what sounded good.
Interesting thread. I think the OP has been answered many times over! As some who was taught “classical” music from the age of 8 but discovered that I could improvise fairly quickly, I kind of have a foot in both camps. I am still astonished however, that music is still taught the “old-fashioned” way.
I had a piano pupil for a while who was about 11, he could play the shit out of his exam pieces but was bored with it, which was why his Mum brought him to me. At his first lesson I asked him to play something for me, which he did, one of his classical pieces. I then said “what’s the first chord?” He looked at the piano, played it, and looked at me, baffled. It was C major, the simplest most basic chord you can play on the piano. He didn’t know what he was playing.
NB To play a C major chord, play the white note to the left of one of the pairs of black notes. That’s C, anywhere on the keyboard. Then add an E, which is 2 notes to the right (immediately to the right of the pair of black notes) and a G, which is another 2 notes to the right. Play the 3 notes together and you have a C chord. Thank you, that’ll be $80 and I’ll see you next week
Thanks, Chrisf, for what has turned out to be a very illuminating and entertaining thread.
I can’t help wanting to compare classical music with the world of drama.
In a play, an actor may be playing a character that does not appear until Act 4.
In a touring band, I suspect you create a compact unit where everybody is pulling their weight from the first note.
That cheeky chappy, Retro, suggested that jazz and folk are genres for the older listener.
Non-bloody sense!
Here’s the talented Iona Fife to prove him wrong
To put the record straight, Retro has been tipping me off about lots of wonderful Scottish artists.
Venture north of Hadrian’s Wall with him, you will never want to return south again!
Did I? I may have stated the audiences often may be. As in the question, who are the youngest people at a folk festival? The performers.
I learned piano and guitar at school, both taught in, I suppose, the conventional way, of learning to read notes on a score, and practising between lessons the piece I was asked to. Even something a simple as G major or F major stumped me as I would invariably forget the F# or Bb. Repetition bored me, I want playing music I enjoyed, just exercises to get up to standard. With guitar, it was even worse. I was being made to sit in a classical pose, frame my dominant left hand around a sequence of unnatural and painful finger positions, while my right hand had to pluck notes, while reading from a score. All I wanted to do was play Quo chords.
I ended up with Grade 6 music theory and no ability to play either instrument, because frankly studying the mathematical logic behind the music was less painful than trying to play the tedious stuff I was given.
It was only hearing the Morse theme and Nick Drake’s simpler pieces (Know, Horn) that made me want to pick up the guitar again, and find my own way into intuitive plucking and octave harmonies.
And then years later,when my wife bought a piano, I decided to try at that again. I got Pacibel’s Canon and forced my way into it. Because it’s such a melodious and familiar piece, even the basics I could manage at first were joyful, and fun to build on. I’m at a similar level of playful incompetence with the Moonlight Sonata, Nyman’s Piano score,and My Baby Just Cares For Me. I don’t care, because it’s just great being about to play an approximation of something that’s beautiful to hear and feel.
As I intuit my way into music playing, those years of music theory kind of help, in understanding why and how what I’m playing, but they’re only really a recipe. Cooking and eating a good meal doesn’t always depend on using a precise list of ingredients or following a specific method of cooking. Ok, it may not be cordon bleu, but it can still nourish the soul.