But if you miscount, better be late than come in early! 
I find it a lot easier to improvise on the sax than I do on any other instrument, but that may be just because I’m more proficient at it. I don’t think there’s anything special about the way you play a sax that makes it any easier/harder to improvise with.
HILARIOUS! 
Another anecdote: My conductor in college said he was once preforming in an opera group and the wind section all bet to see who would memorize the whole opera first. He also observed a performance from an opera that had been running for very long time. He peaked over the barrier to see one of the cellists reading a magazine while he was playing.
Orchestral strings are different again, in that a very physical geography of notes and especially of keys is developed through muscle memory.
I take it you’ve never played in a big European cathedral, then!
While it may have sounded like performance level, they may not have thought so. When you have the ability to sound good just sight-reading, you often strive for even higher quality for performance.
As for the OP: when I play “by ear,” I usually don’t have anything memorized but the melody of the song. I actually have more memorized when I play with sheet music. But with neither do I have the whole thing memorized. While I can improv around that in the former case, I can’t in the latter.
Still, I do think it looks tacky when a 3 person orchestra has to have sheet music to play with a pop band, and they only play the same phrase over and over. I’ve always assumed it was because these people are usually not key members of the band, and don’t get to practice with them that often.
I’d much rather them use simplified sheet music and hide it, or at least format it so it doesn’t look out of place.
(Oh, and a lot of choir directors don’t like people to hold music, either. I don’t know why, but choirs seem to have more problems following the conductor when they have music than bands/orchestras. Maybe reading the words and the music takes more concentration?)
[RIGHT]BigT- concert Clarinetist, Pop Pianist, and occasional Vocalist[/RIGHT]
Oddly enough I thought they would probably end up playing Ode to Joy. I must be psychic.
Contrapuntal, that vid is blocked on YouTube in the UK. Could you give me a few key terms I can search on to try to find it elsewhere?
Those horn players may just be pick-up musicians hired to play for that one performance. They haven’t lived with the songs for months the way the core group has. They may just attend the dress rehearsal and then play on the concert that you see. There’s no time to have it securely memorized in that kind of situation.
No doubt. They were the premier symphony orchestra in that town, under the baton of arguably the best conductor in town (Isaiah Jackson), and I was a dumb high school kid who thought that my own band sounded pretty decent. I was easily impressed.
From that I would have thought you were one of the many other percussionists I’ve worked with in my time as a percussionist…
As a percussionist, I’ve had to deal with just that same phenomenon. Now, imagine having to switch instruments between those rests and keep counting as your running across the stage. Fun. Or not.
Another reason why music helps so much is repeated measures. In Holst’s The Planets Suite, the “Jupiter” movement, I played timpani. After about 50 some measures of the same rhythm on the same note, I’d get lost. I would make notations on the music as to what else was going on in the orchestra at certain points to help me keep track (the cellos do such and such at measure x, the tubas come in here, etc.)
If they were playing enough short pieces, they might not know any one piece that well. Also, as others have remarked, in an ensemble situation, even if they know all the notes, they may still need the added security of being able to count automatically where they need to come in, etc., without having to think about it all the time. (A soloist, who traditionally memorizes music, doesn’t need to worry about this nearly as much, since the soloist only needs to coordinate with one other body (the accompanist or conductor), and if the soloist gets off or miscounts the accompanist will generally figure out how to stay on course with the soloist. Note that the accompanist almost always plays with music.)
Of course, there are string quartet pieces coughPachebel’s Canoncough where no musician who’s been playing more than a couple of years should really have to use music
On a related note, Sam Stone is absolutely right, at least in my experience as a violinist. I trained Suzuki, which means I learned a lot of things by ear, and I also have good sight reading skills, and the two ways of learning seem very different to me (think about memorizing a poem or a quote by a) reading it over and over again, or b) hearing someone speak it over and over again, and you might see what I mean – the picture in your head of the poem is very different even though you might be able to memorize it pretty well both ways).
When I played in a professional symphony, we would often receive the sheet music on Friday. Rehearsals would start Monday. You needed to know the music by then. “Know” as in “be able to play it with good intonation and without mistakes”. Memorizing a 2+ hour program in a few days was not going to happen. Keep in mind all these folks had day jobs as well. Starting Monday, we would have 4-5 rehearsals (string has 2 rehearsals on Monday), then a concert Friday and Saturday evenings.
For a pop concert, such as when we played with Tony Bennett, we would only have one rehearsal. This was the first time we would see the music. The concert would be that evening. This music was a bit easier. Again, no chance to memorize it.
I think it’s easier to memorize a solo piece than an orchestral piece of the same length. For me at least, melodies are easier than disjointed accompaniment.
I think part of it has to do with repeated passages. In a typical rock song there’s basically verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus. And most of the material is pretty simple, just chords or a riff. In jazz it’s just a tune with some chord changes, and everything else is improvised. And the chord changes are repeated until every musician’s ego has been stroked.
Classical very often has very little repeated material. In a symphony the first movement might have one very long repeated section, but even then possibly in a different key.
I remember talking to a violist about the opening section of Das Rhinegold. The viola part is this kind of sparkly trilly stuff that goes on for like seven hours, and never repeats at all. It would be like trying to memorize pi to the millionth digit.
I’ve several classical-musician friends and they agree with most of what’s said here, particularly with “getting” an unfamiliar piece quickly.
Another good reason for the sheet music is that, while rehearsing, eacvh condcutor will give different instructions, so even if you know the notes, you have to look for you annotations regarding how the conductor wants them played. all classicla musicians bring pencil and erase r to the rehearsal.
As for rock drummer, most of the time you just keep the same pattern and even most of your fills are pretty much the same. Good classical percusionists not only played drum et al, you must play “musical” percussion (e.g. xylophone, vibraphone) and hold your on on a piano.
Of course, the “worst” is the sometimes endless rests. You can see horn players countng with their fingers when they have 3 or 4 bars’ rest, try that for 40!
I really thought this was going to be a link to a bit of The Music Man.