It is usual on April the first to write spoof news reports
and I suppose blog entries. But when the president of the United States visits
the country where he keeps a special prison for torturing people and berates
that country for its human rights record, then a few days later as the
president of the only country that has ever actually used nuclear weapons waxes
indignant because a small country on the other side of the world seems to want
to have such weapons itself, it’s hard to know what is truth and what spoof.
Meanwhile in England a viola player is suing his orchestra
because his hearing has been permanently damaged: it seems the conductor had
seated the violas too close to the brass for a performance of something by
Wagner.
Actually I do sympathise, even though the only times I have
ever played in orchestras it has been in the brass section: sometimes on
trumpet, sometimes on horn. Horn players can have almost the opposite problem
to our violist: the horn has the reputation of being the most difficult of all
instruments and certainly if you hear a cracked note from an orchestra it is
likely to be the horns. For technical reasons, the same fingering can produce
many different notes on the horn, and it’s only by very fine lip and breath
control that one can select the right one. If the conductor puts the horns too
close to the timpani, the shock-wave from a goodly drum-bash can be picked up
by the bell of the horn and be sort of hydraulically concentrated as it travels
through the several metres of brass tube to emerge in a puff that can blast the
player’s lips right off the mouthpiece. (That is not, by the way, the reason
horn players stuff their right hand up the bell.)
Still, viola players are always odd. Look at a photograph of
any string quartet: I guarantee that the one who looks weirdest is the violist.
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