from my limited knowledge in music

the things i realised about chinese and wind orchestra:

1)forte(f)

-chinese: sharp,as in the sound pierce right into your head...

-wind: actually sounds majestic, intimidating.

reason:

western has a larger variety of instruments that produce a much lower tone, to counter the other instruments that covers the upper parts of the barlines...chinese music emphasizes more on the main instruments like erhu and dizi. So whenever wind orchestras play a part out loud,the extract sounds heavy,big,and overwhelming, whereas for chinese orchestras,the louder they play, the more the instruments like zhongruan and pipa etc (and maybe if there's guzheng) gets more and more inaudible as dizi, suona and erhu blast away their high notes....Honestly,i like to hear clearer sounds from both the melody and counter melody...balanced sound is good. But then when you think about it, chinese music hasn't change very drastically over the years, but new and improved instruments are constantly being invented and added into western orchestras...hmmmmmmm....

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2)pieces

-chinese: a bit predictable, to me, that is..

-wind: you can never find songs that are of the same style in one concert.

reason:

so far.....i haven't hear chinese orchestras play songs that are not 'chinese-related',if you know what i mean..(do you?)...i find them always revolving around the chinese folk songs, songs that are related to the stories they have, for example, The Butterfly Lovers, Cowherd and Weaver Girl..in my opinion, it doesn't hurt to experiment on different styles of music once in a while(SOCUSM excluded). And due to the fact that the western music world has more composers from different parts of the world(europe,america,great britain,and some from the middle east),the wide range of articulations & expressions, and each composers may use a different set of instruments in their compositions in different eras, obviously there are a larger collection of songs to choose from. So far, i still like going to wind orchestra concerts than chinese orchestra concerts...but we'll see..maybe my view will change after attending the next chinese orchestra concert?

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3)techniques

-chinese: lots running notes...similar melodies...repetitive.

-wind: again i will stress on the wide range of composers and styles.

reason:

i don't know if i'm bias or anything,but i feel that the songs(that the chinese orchestra plays) are,yes, may be about different stories,from different settings, but the flow of all the pieces are usually predictable...the tempo maybe slow at first then fast or vice versa, but at the end of the story all i can remember from the 15-20minutes piece is nothing but a few bars of running notes, mostly from the erhu section. when it's slow, you'll hear the cello,double bass. when it's fast, count on the erhu and dizi. Whereas in the wind orchestra you may have the trombones as the main melody, the french horn, saxophone, clarinet, euphonium, flute, or the trumpets...

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4)percussion~

this i have to say, hands down, no matter what kind of orchestra,or what songs you play...percussion will always sound awesome.

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anyway. it's only my opinion lah.