At 8:43 AM -0400 11/1/12, Christopher Smith wrote: > >I have to step in here. Maybe standards are >different in the States, but around here ALL the >string players HAVE to check out the parts >beforehand, and if the woodwind players don't >they take their lives in their hands. This >applies not only to the Montreal Symphony, but >even in the secondary orchestras, like the one I >play in. Even the brass players look over the >concert repertoire (that they get two weeks >ahead of time by union agreement) to see if >there's anything they have to practice, and >anything that's unusually-notated definitely >gets some woodshed time.
Suffice it that there are different standards in different situations. What you describe certainly is standard for symphony orchestras, and when Joe Gingold (former concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra) was teaching at Indiana he impressed on his students that you went to the first rehearsal with the music completely learned. Unless you were concertmaster. And then you went to the first rehearsal with the music MEMORIZED so you never had to take your eyes off the conductor! But for pickup orchestras for shows, the music arrives with the Music Director on the day of the performance, is NEVER allowed to be taken away from the venue (because it's all proprietary arrangements and they do NOT carry a box full of extra parts with them!), and has to be sightread (or sometimes even played at sight with nothing but a talkdown in advance) during the union-mandated rehearsal time. When I toured with Mancini back in the '70s we went on stage the first night of the tour having hit the high spots in rehearsal, but never having played through the entire book. But Hank knew exactly where the potential trouble spots were, and we'd been hired because we COULD play at sight, usually with nothing but a quick visual scan of the parts when they're handed out. How about Broadway shows in NYC? Is the music EVER available in advance or does it show up for the first rehearsal? It certainly isn't available for touring company road shows. The same is true of recording sessions, of course, since as often as not the music isn't even finished before the first session, which explains why the people who are first-call recording musicians are the best readers in the world, and can catch and fix any copyist errors the first time through! John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music School of Performing Arts & Cinema College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences 290 College Ave., Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[email protected]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "Machen Sie es, wie Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schön." (Do it as you like, just make it beautiful!) --Johannes Brahms _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
