When is it an orchestra?

MusicBrainz
1

In latin music (and I guess the same is true for jazz), there are a lot of formations that are called “orchestra” or “orquesta” that aren’t necessarily “orchestra sized”. Do we have some established guidelines for when to mark an artist “group” vs “orchestra”?

I’ve been defaulting to call them all “group” absent evidence that they have say 15+ members (and I see “orchestra” rather as a specialization of “group”, so “group” feels like a safe default). I don’t particularly care about any of this, would just like to avoid unnecessary discussions on such edits down the line.

I guess we could also just say if it has “orchestra” in the name, then it’s an orchestra…

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2

In jazz, groups with not that many instruments are more often referred to as ensembles, but I would also accept an orchestra with 10 members if it’s called orchestra.
Group is certainly not wrong. :slight_smile:

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3

There’s solo performers with orchestra in their names, so that’s probably not quite good enough :smiley:

4

When adding jazz ensembles, I pretty much never use “orchestra” regardless of size. I agree that “group” works fine as an alternative.

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5

Group seems sensible to me. Orchestra types should match a dictionary definition of the word.

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