When playing in an orchestra at a high level of experience, say The Juilliard School sort of experience, are there times where the players would need to memorize songs/ play without a conductor?

Most orchestral musicians use their music when playing because they have hand-written notes on the music which the conductor gives them during rehearsals. There are a few times that I have seen orchestras without music...usually playing pieces that they have played 100s of times, like Beethoven's 5th Symphony at an outdoor concert. But more often than not, the music stands are in front of the musicians.

However, when you do solo work, you will often memorize your music. If you are practicing enough, memorization naturally comes. I bet you have already noticed this when you work with your orchestra now. You rehearse a piece so much, that you get sections memorized or barely need to look at the music.

Are you doing solo competitions? I am assuming you are doing this type of work if you are wanting to be a Music Performance Major. Competitions, and doing well as a soloist are a must. There are no professional orchestras that have people who have only played in ensembles. They all can play on their own and in small groups. In college, you do not major in orchestra, you major on your instrument. ie: Bachelor's Degree in Violin Performance, Bachelors Degree in Flute Performance, etc. If you decide to be an orchestra director in high school or middle school, then I suggest a degree in Music Education with an emphasis on your particular instrument, and then going on to a Masters degree if you want to teach at the college level.

To get into a college, you must send in an audition tape in the fall, the year before you want to enter the school. If you pass the first round, then you will be invited for a live audition sometime in Jan-March. The schools then let people know if they are admitted sometime between Feb and April to attend school in the fall. Your private lesson teacher can help you determine what pieces you will record and use for the audition process. More than likely, 3 pieces from different musical time periods. Such as: a Mozart, a Weber and a Contemporary piece. I am an accompanist, so I play for many instrumentalists. The high school students I accompany are often learning concertos by the time they are 15, if not 13 years old and in middle school. All of the pieces are memorized to be able to go on to state competitions. Again, this is actually easy for the students because they spend so many hours working on the pieces in detail. The pieces are even long...between 5-15 minutes each. For local competitions, and for auditions, occasionally students will not play their pieces by memory. But they can still just about play them by memory! They just work that much!

I think orchestra or band members rarely have to memorize music. One reason is most instrumental parts are not continuous--they have lots of rests and enter the piece at differing times. Often a soloist, say a pianist will memorize a piece if he/she are the "star" of the piece (and orchestra at times is even like accompaniment (same with a vocalist, they often memorize).

Another reason might be that orchestras sometimes have to sub out a lot, re some rotation and they may come to the performance as soon as even day before and on top of that if they have a full program, then way too much to even sometimes learn quickly, let alone memorize.

You'll do fine just paying attention, and really grasping the full sound of your section and the piece.

I've never worked with an orchestra that had to memorize their music. I have done some video shoots with orchestra where they had to memorize. But it was a very short piece of uses

Hi, When you are playing with a Professional Orchestra, most of the time you will be reading, sometimes you have to memorize your music, which you don<code>t have to fear it....
It comes by conditioning your mind and talent, in other words, is doable.
I used to only play music by reading it, i have to have the music in front of me, is a scary feeling, what it means is that you haven</code>t develop that part of your brain.
Now I do big orchestrations , presentations all by memory.
You`ll get use to it.
Best of luck for you!!