Where does Mont Alto, a mere salon quintet, get off calling itself an “orchestra”?
Pure (but historically authentic) American hype. In the survey mentioned above, only 6.6% of the orchestras had more than ten players, 29% had from six to ten, and the remainder were “orchestras” with five (18%), four (13%), three (22%), or two (11%) players. The unscientific nature of the survey makes extrapolation from this data risky, but if the data were assumed accurate, in the roughly 15,000 American theaters there would have been around 3700 “orchestras,” of which around 250 would have been larger than ten players, 1100 with six to ten players, and 2000 with three to five players. If you were to plot a graph of the data, you’d notice that five players may have been the most common configuration (depending on how that 6-10 category breaks down).
