Organising musicians is often said to be like herding cats. I think the big difference is musicians are more likely to steal each other’s food.

But there’s a massive variability in how far in advance is deemed acceptable, necessary or alternatively worrying for organising music. Ben Mowat of the String Project is a little concerned we only have eight rehearsals to gear up for our very big gig on 24 April (get it in the diary now folks! The Cellar, Oxford); and last weekend The Filthy Spectacula (including me) were getting worried about not having any detailed plans from the director for a music video being shot four weeks later.

On the other hand, on Tuesday I answered an email about needing a viola for a (concert, not staged) performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. On Wednesday evening I was in a rehearsal, sight-reading basically the whole thing along with eight of the eventual 11 instrumentalists; last night (Friday) we performed it, feeling hard-worked and nervous but without any major problems.

Partly, this just says that if you have to pay for rehearsal space and people’s travel and/or time, and you’re not going to make much if any profit on the performances, then you cut all the expenses to the bone, including rehearsals, and count on good hired hands to work with the situation. But it’s also a little to do with a truth about classical and popular music that is the reverse of common myth.

Classical musicians are normally assumed to be super-prepared, having rehearsed daily for weeks and tied down every last nuance. And that can be true, but it’s usually closer to the amateur than the professional experience. (most) Professional classical musicians have some key advantages for fast preparation:

• They don’t have to write their own music. They don’t even have to write their own parts to existing songs. The parts come pre-made.
• They don’t have to memorise their parts, just know them well enough to play them fluently and with ensemble coherence – but with the notes in front of them. Think of the difference between a radio play (even broadcast live), where scripts are fine provided delivery is natural and rustling paper doesn’t get picked up by the mikes, and having to memorise the same script to, say, act it on stage.
• Questionable advantage to some, but I think if you’re used to reading music you’re likely to sight-read much more quickly than you can learn parts by ear.

It’s the bands writing originals, or doing creative-ish covers, that have to spend time painstakingly jamming out arrangements, learning chord progressions from each other, workshopping ideas of sounds in the rehearsal room. Even covers bands can at least learn parts pretty much entire in isolation (meaning, at home with YouTube … ) and only need the rehearsal time to fit them together. But having done all of these to some extent, unless everything you do is a twelve-bar bash through, the apparently turn up and play rock-n-roll bands who don’t write anything down need most preparation; a bunch of strangers can viably show up, spend three hours rehearsing music they’ve never played and haven’t necessarily heard or seen before, and perform an evening of (relatively) very complex and ‘difficult’ classical music.

Many things are not what they seem in music. Including preparation.