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STRING PLAYERS AND BRASS PLAYERS: WHAT THEY THINK OF EACH OTHER
Why can’t they get along?
According to a survey of Glasgow-based symphony orchestra musicians, here’s how string players view brass players:
- Slightly oafish and uncouth
- Heavy boozers
- Empty vessels
- Like to be in the limelight
- Loud-mouthed and coarse
- Don’t practise
And here’s how brass players view string players:
- Like a flock of bloody sheep
- Precious
- Overly sensitive and touchy
- Humourless
- Think they’re God’s gift to music
- A bunch of weaklings
As if that weren’t bad enough, in 2004, the string section of the Beethoven Orchestra of Germany went to court to get more money than the brass players. The string players argued they deserved higher pay because they play more notes than the brass players.
Perhaps a Ph. D. candidate in search of an interesting research project could devise a method for testing the implied hypotheses of the Glasgow musicians: that brass players evolved from drunken oafs, and string players evolved from humourless sheep.