This is not for any school assignment or anything like that. I'm just curious, so you don't have to take the time (unless you want to which I genuinely appreciate) to write long answers. Thanks in advance.
Alright, I can answer this since I know a bit about it:
What you have to keep in mind about Western Music is that, for most of its history it has been heavily influenced and patronized by the elite and wealthy (Church, nobility, and the noveau riche )
Generally speaking, having large orchestras took a lot of money, and at around 1700, patronage was still very much in the hands of the nobility. If you wanted to have an orchestra play your stuff, you probably wanted to be friends with one of these people . Many of Hadyn's symphonies were composed for the orchestra of his patrons, the Ezterhazy family. Many of Beethoven's pieces were commissioned by nobility as well (the 3rd was commissioned by Joseph Lobkowitz, a prince). Some of his quartets and piano sonatas even contain the names of his patrons (Razumovsky, Waldstein).
Essentially, "art music" was patronized and listened to by the elite. Now, this is not to say that people did not hear orchestras at all in their life. Bach's St.Matthew Passion would have been performed in a church, for the congregation. However, for most his life his orchestral works, yet again, were played privately for patrons.
Works with vocalists and orchestra, tend to be the one place were *anyone* could have heard the music, and this dates back to the medieval period. Musicologist Richard Taruksin (where I'm getting a decent amount of my information) talks how The Mass Ordinary (a genre popular in the renaissance, incorporating lots of multi-voice singing) was important as a a political genre, as it helped to represent ecclesiastical power because it helped provide a connection between humankind and the divine. (Taruskin, Vol.1, 460). The Mass Ordinary Genre would eventually grow to feature an orchestra *with* the choir at around Bach's time*, which is close enough to the year of your question. It is important to note that the Church had an motivation to make this sort of music accessible and *heard*
So perhaps, it was pretty easy to eventually see an orchestra, but frankly, if you wanted to go watch an orchestra "just cause", you'd have best luck with your local opera house (if you were lucky enough to have one), but even then you'd have to pay for admission (I'm not quite sure on the price of admission, although all of my sources indicate that a "commoner" could attend). Notice how the genres with voice tend to be more accessible to the public. Instrumental "high art" music, as mentioned, was mostly a hobby of the elite.
Closer to the end of the 18th century, if you really truly desperately wanted to see an orchestra, you could go see a Singspiel! It's like an opera, but instead of recitative it has dialogue! Wow! Imagine that! Opera, but you can understand the words. Nobility thought of it as a "low genre", so ticket prices were probably pretty reasonable.
Anyways, here's a tl;dr: Hope your church puts on a mass with orchestra, or oratorio. Go to the opera. It is quite unlikely you'd be exposed to the purely instrumental orchestral tradition unless you had some sort of musical training, or were connected to nobility. To be honest, most of your musical entertainment is probably going to come from folk traditions that the classical establishment seems to have erased from history.
Burkholder, J. Peter, et al. A History of Western Music. W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Wolff, Christoph. Johann Sebastian Bach: the Learned Musician. Oxford University Press, 2014.
*If someone more familiar with the genre could fill me in on when this started to take place, that'd be great. I can't quite remember.
Monovfox lays out the general predicament of any low-class person wanting to see a concert. However, there was a very interesting exception: Thomas Britton, the "musical small coal man". He was only a merchant who dealt in charcoal, but dearly loved music and around 1700 began to hold concerts in the loft of his house, which he had fitted up with a harpsichord and small organ. His love of music brought in some notable performers, like Handel, and while the staircase to the loft was notoriously narrow, he seems to have been almost universally admired for making the effort.
A useful long article on Britton can be found here , and portraits here