If you have played in a band for years your first orchestral rehearsal may be a baffling experience. Playing in an orchestra requires a different set of skills and sensibilities than playing in a band.
In a band you spend most of your time playing doubled parts. Since many bands don't have enough horns or strong players, much of the music is doubled somewhere in the ensemble. In orchestral parts there is much less doubling.
In a band it's unusual to not have percussion giving you a beat. In an orchestra the percussion tends to add color and is rarely giving the beat. Orchestras operate much more like chamber music. For a more complete description of how to play in an ensemble read Whip Your Brass Into Shape - The Brigade System. It's more important in an orchestra to understand where your particular part fits in.
Another important difference is in actual playing style. Band music needs to be more staccato, just because of the nature of the ensemble and the music. Orchestral style generally needs to have longer notes.
A subset of this difference is what we call Classical style. By Classical with a capital C we mean from the Classical era, esp. the music of Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven.
In classical style we play notes full length with a clean tongue. By full length we mean full! For example in this snippet from the Beethoven Sonata:
we would play the first note all the way until we had to tongue the sixteenth note. And we would tongue cleanly, using a T sound, not a D sound. We would play the quarters a full beat and the half notes a full two beats.
If we were playing this in a band piece we would simply separate a little bit to sound cleaner.
In a band you spend most of your time playing doubled parts. Since many bands don't have enough horns or strong players, much of the music is doubled somewhere in the ensemble. In orchestral parts there is much less doubling.
In a band it's unusual to not have percussion giving you a beat. In an orchestra the percussion tends to add color and is rarely giving the beat. Orchestras operate much more like chamber music. For a more complete description of how to play in an ensemble read Whip Your Brass Into Shape - The Brigade System. It's more important in an orchestra to understand where your particular part fits in.
Another important difference is in actual playing style. Band music needs to be more staccato, just because of the nature of the ensemble and the music. Orchestral style generally needs to have longer notes.
A subset of this difference is what we call Classical style. By Classical with a capital C we mean from the Classical era, esp. the music of Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven.
In classical style we play notes full length with a clean tongue. By full length we mean full! For example in this snippet from the Beethoven Sonata:
If we were playing this in a band piece we would simply separate a little bit to sound cleaner.
