[Small Hijack]
I don’t play anything so I can’t say how true this is, but here’s an interesting Cracked.com article about the dark side of professional orchestras…
I believe they invented the valve trombone so a trumpet player can cover for a missing trombonist.
And to the listening public as well.
Boring? Try playing the viola part in *Pomp and Circumstance #1, *repeatedly, while an entire graduation class of over 1,000 marches onto the stage.
And since people are mentioning Pachelbel’s Canon and how boring it is, it is contractually required that I link this video.
All true. When I went to my first professional lesson with the guy who played tuba in the SF Symphony, he told me there were ten jobs in the country for tuba players. As in, if you got that job, it would pay your bills and you’d make a decent living and you wouldn’t have to do anything on the side. Plus, most of those guys were in their 30’s and 40’s. The Winnepeg Symphony (note: not one of the 10) held auditions, and over 200 tuba players showed up.
I mentioned the Oakland Symphony in a previous post–the people who play for Oakland also have private students, and teach at a local university, and have students there, and play in smaller groups like brass quintets or string quartets. They all work 80-100 hours a week. My teacher basically told me “don’t quit your day job.”
I should have listened.
That video is about how playing the piece is boring, not about the piece itself being boring.
In the strange way of music, just because a piece is boring to play doesn’t mean it’s boring to listen to.
Pachelbel’s Canon and Ravel’s Bolero are such popular pieces not in spite of being boring. There is something in them for the audience. But to play … boy, are they easy to play.
It’s like that key scene in Five Easy Pieces, when Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) plays a piece on the piano beautifully, but then reveals that it meant nothing to him—it was an easy piece to play. It was easy to fool the audience into believing he felt something.
Indeed, it suggests to me that this might indicate the genius of the composition itself. It requires such little effort on the part of the performer, but can convey so much to the audience, things that the performer doesn’t feel, things that are only in the music itself.
I was a member of a small town symphony orchestra for years. And my job WAS to be the alternate. In my case, the woodwind alternate. I play all the woodwind instruments with some degree of expertise - at least enough expertise for a small town symphony - and they would give me a call if someone were ill or if they were performing a piece of music that required an instrument they didn’t usually use.
So yes, technically, there are understudies for an orchestra.