When an orchestra plays a rock song, they lose everything that makes a rock performance work – they can’t syncopate, they can’t improvise, and they can’t duplicate the individual performer’s rapport with the audience.
-R.A.D. Stainforth
I read it here.
(For what it’s worth, I can syncopate and improvise. But if I played a rock song I still wouldn’t compare to the rocker.)
Er, I seem to be all befuddled here – there was no syncopation before rock? So no orchestras have ever played dotted rhythms?
And methinks this author does not grok the concept of an orchestra (or chorus, or band, or…), which is about the ensemble’s rapport with the audience vs. the individual’s (concertos excepted, obviously).
I believe very strongly that a sense of ensemble (or lack of same) is one of the main factors that sets the amateur group apart from the professional – getting past the “what I’m doing” to the “what we’re doing…”