Check my other comments for more on this, but the biggest factor is not how long a concert is, but how much continuous playing is expected of people within the concert. Live music is designed with rests built into the parts to get a few seconds off here and there. Film scores are often written with more continuous playing because in the studio you wouldn’t play the whole thing start to finish. You’d do a few minutes, stop, listen, do a few more, etc.

Add to that fact that most movie concerts like this are contractually limited to 3 hours, or else the musicians need to be paid overtime. LOTR Fellowship of the Ring is 2 hours 58 minutes. Add in an intermission, and all of a sudden you’re over the 3 hour time limit and paying a lot extra for overtime.

I stay and watch the credits for any movie with a great score, even when I’m seeing it at the movie theater. It’s free. Why get up and leave if the music is good??? Glad you enjoyed Empire! That was one of my favorites to play, but also one of the most difficult.

Yes! I’d love to do the Bugs Bunny concerts. Haven’t had the chance yet. But I grew up on those old cartoons and would love to play all that. Glad you were aware what a challenge it was for the orchestra!

> Welcome to live music baby.

Thanks? I’ve been doing this job for more than a decade at this point.

> Most bands play for hours at a time without the accompaniment or sheet music. All in the noggin.

The difference between “most bands” and a professional symphony orchestra is that most bands have a repertoire of a few dozen songs which they memorize and play again and again. It’s easy to memorize things when you play the same few repeatedly.

But professional orchestras learn 1-3 new concerts worth of music every week. If it’s a big masterworks week, we probably only learn one set of music. Like an overture, concerto, and a symphony. But in some weeks we might play a kids show, then a light classics concert, then a pops concert all in the same week.

So a masterworks schedule might look like 5 rehearsals and 3 concerts of all the same music in a week. Then we are done with that music and doing something else the next week.

A busier week might be one rehearsal and one concert of kids show music, then the next day two rehearsals of light classics, then the following day two light classics concerts, then the following day a pops rehearsal and concert, then the last day two more pops concerts. So that’s 3 sets of music we’ve learned all within one week.

So when you have only a few rehearsals to learn something, perform it, then show up next week and learn and perform an entirely new set of music, sheet music becomes really important, and it’s not feasible to memorize something you’re only going to play for one week.

I’m not saying one is better or worse. It’s just different. Musical acts that play the same music repeatedly can memorize it more easily. If you play new music every week, it’s not practical to memorize.

You’re right that every profession has its challenges. But every profession also has its give and take. Tax accountants might be really busy and not have a lot of rest from February-April (in the US), but the rest of the year may be a little calmer.

I’m not saying that every concert should be easy, but that as music has progressed through history, so have the demands placed on players. Mozart wrote some great music, but I wouldn’t call most of what he wrote “heavy” repertoire. It’s definitely difficult, and takes a lot of skill to play, but at least personally, I don’t have to rely on raw strength to play Mozart in the same way that I do when I play something like Mahler.

To give a specific example of how a movie might be different than a symphony or an opera: a few years ago we played the soundtrack to Home Alone. The beginning of the movie has some orchestral moments, but also plenty of rests. It’s not that difficult for most of the movie. As the movie progresses and gets into the finale where Kevin defends his home with all the booby traps the score gets more and more difficult, with less and less rest, and more constant playing. The end of Home Alone is basically 20-30 minutes of nonstop playing and barely a moment to catch your breath. This is the part of the movie that is really difficult for players.

In an opera or a symphony, composers could write the exact same amount of notes and rests for the orchestra, but they’d be more likely to be spaced out over the course of the entire evening, and not all crammed into one huge stretch of hardly any rest.

Thanks for being kind and explaining that you didn’t mean to offend. I appreciate that! This is just my own experience. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, so if you don’t personally find playing a movie score any harder than playing an opera, more power to you!

Hey, thanks, /u/PubeSmoker69 for explaining to me how I know nothing about the field that I work in! I mentioned in another comment about some of the differences between music written to be recorded in a studio and music written to be played live. But to reiterate: one of the biggest differences between a movie score and an opera is usually the amount of rests built in to each individual part. Composers writing for live orchestra know that players need rests from time to time, so they’ll have the violins sit out for 32 bars while the woodwinds play a bit.

Intermission is great for taking a break, and of course, movies and operas can both have them, but you still need the little “micro breaks” within the playing portion of a concert to let your body rest and get ready for the next big passage.

I’m not saying ALL movies are scored that way, but that sometimes movie composers don’t build in the same amount of small rests that a concert composer may, and it definitely makes our jobs more challenging.

No, nothing specific. But balancing the orchestra is one of the things we spend the most time on for live concerts, and it’s something that you don’t really have to worry about as much (but still should be considered) when doing studio work. So it was just an example I thought of that comes up from time to time.

In any art form there’s the art, but also the craft. You can have the best idea or theme for a painting, but if you don’t understand the craft of mixing paints to make the right shade, you probably won’t become a well regarded painter.

As a composer you can have an amazing idea or even an amazing melody, but if you don’t understand how to write it in a way that real musicians can play, it won’t be a successful musical work.

So practically that means things like having enough rests in the parts so players aren’t playing too much without a break. Writing parts not just in the high register which may be more physically taxing. Not having a melody in one clarinet that’s accompanied by the entire brass section, because it wouldn’t get heard without microphones and amplification.

There are plenty more examples I could come up, with but those are a few that don’t work well for live performance, but are easily overcome in the world of studio recording where you can adjust the balance any way you want, or stop and re record passages at will, or save the upcoming difficult passage to record tomorrow when everyone’s fresh again.

That doesn’t mean that film scores aren’t great art. It just means that they weren’t designed with the same “live performance” type requirements in mind. The craft of film scoring is a bit different than the craft of writing a symphony.

> If the movie heavily relies on rock music, then they can just have a rock band play the live music instead of an orchestra.

Yes, they could do that, but then an orchestra wouldn’t put it on their own concert schedule and it wouldn’t be an orchestra event, which is fine. It would just change the type of event it is.

> Or maybe it could be some members of the orchestra may also be rock players, if both types of music are in the movie.

This is pretty rare in the orchestra world. Most members of professional orchestras have specialized degrees in orchestral performance, and have spent tens of thousands of hours practicing their instrument. The sheer amount of time required mostly precludes people from playing more than one instrument at a professional level (unless they’re very similar, like flute and piccolo, or clarinet and bass clarinet). There may be someone in the orchestra who plays guitar for fun, but the chances of that person actually being good enough at guitar to perform a movie score for paying audience members is vanishingly small. Everyone you see on stage at an orchestra concert has dedicated their life and career to mastering one instrument and learning as much as they possibly can about it.

I can’t remember every movie I’ve done, but I’ve done Star Wars IV, V, VI, Harry Potter 2, 3, 4, Home Alone, Amadeus, and some other random things like nature documentaries, etc. I might be forgetting a couple, but I’d say I’ve done 10-12 movies since they started getting popular as orchestra concerts.

As you can see, it skews heavily towards things like John Williams, probably because those are the most “involved” orchestra scores which will give the audience something to appreciate over just seeing a movie in a standard format.

You need the movie to have a largely orchestral score able to be reproduced by a standard orchestra. If a score relies a lot on electronic music, or rock music then it’s pointless to have the whole orchestra there if they barely play. So that already limits which movies will get done.

The Star Wars movies were definitely the hardest, both in terms of actually difficult notes, and also the endurance to make it through from start to finish.

Some are easier. Amadeus was easy because it’s all Mozart, which isn’t super heavy. The documentaries were mostly pretty easy, but not as fun or rewarding for the musicians because it’s more “background music” as opposed to something like John Williams where often the music feels like it’s an integral part of the story, or even a character in its own right.

If it’s by John Williams it’s probably pretty difficult.

As someone who plays in an orchestra professionally, these concerts are getting very popular and most orchestras are doing several per year now.

The thing people don’t realize is that these scores were meant to be recorded over the course of a week or so, and done in small chunks at a time.

If you’re recording a Star Wars movie you don’t just play the soundtrack front to back with the movie. You record a few minutes, they take second to listen, you might go back and hit a few bars again, then move on to a new section. Then they piece everything together at the end with editing. Recording the score to a 2 hour movie takes dozens of hours of recording time spread over several days.

To actually sit and play the score to a Star Wars movie from beginning to end with no breaks is incredibly difficult. The music was not designed to be played all at once like that.

So the next time you attend one of these concerts you can maybe have a different perspective on what the musicians are doing up there.

Was trying to find the second most eastern “El” city. Is it Elgin, IL? I couldn’t find anything else in that area starting with El. If it’s Elgin, that seems to be outside the spirit of this map. But would love to know if I missed finding a different city.

(The one in Florida appears to be El Portal, which is a small neighborhood in Miami. I was surprised to see that it is actually its own city, with its own local government, etc.)