Sydney Life

Don’t ask me how we got onto the topic of escaping from dangerous animals. All I know is that should I ever run into a shark, crocodile, or wombat, I’ll have a slim chance at survival. For those of you now burning with curiosity: poke it in the eyes, run in zigzags, and climb a tree, respectively.

I’m still sceptical about the “running in zigzags” bit. A little part of me holds crocodile intelligence in the highest esteem, and thinks that maybe a crocodile would be capable of realising that zigzagging invariably brings one back to a middle point very frequently, thereby meaning that all they have to do is amble along that middle line and gobble you up. However, there is another [apparently] effective way of defending oneself against a croc. Holding its mouth shut. Allegedly, the crocodile will be incapable of opening it again. If anyone has tried this mildly terrifying strategy and survived, I’d love to hear about it…

Anyway, this somewhat irrelevant* line of conversation inspired a topic of even greater irrelevance – the corresponding features between certain musical instruments & their players to a wide range of exotic fauna. A full orchestral list would be a little too hefty a project for one mere blog post – no matter how much I am procrastinating from study/practice/assignments. So here are some of the more elite members of my menagerie:

First in the unofficial March of the Animals come the guitarists. Like the gentle baboon, they sit at the music café, in the library, in the gardens, on the stairs...they’re kind of everywhere actually. But anyway, they sit, staring dolefully into the distance. Just like a baboon will scratch its rear on a kind of absentminded impulse, so to do guitarists whip out a guitar and give it a scratch. And, as with a bottom-scratching baboon, it’s not particularly offensive, but you don’t always want it next to you while you’re eating.

Secondly, double basses. I like to think of them as hippopotami (or hippopotamuses…my spell check says both are correct). They’re big, they look kind of placidly ugly, and are kind of sweet when they’re on your roof eating cake. But hippos can crush you to a puree in their enormous mouths, and are responsible for a big percentage of deaths-by-animals in Africa. Remember this next time you see a double bass section – they might look goofy, but they can be murderously tough bastards.

Obviously, I couldn’t write a blog post about musicians and their instruments without including a bit about violins, but I have to say I’m a bit at loss as to their corresponding animal. The most logical choice would be “my favourite animal”, but as that’s cows, I don’t know if it would be taken the right way. Peacocks would probably be a more accurate parallel – we can look very pretty and exciting, but on the flip side can sound utterly disgusting. And if you offend us, we’ll walk away looking ridiculous with our oversized tails (where tails are directly proportionate to size of ego) trailing awkwardly behind.

Moving towards the aviary we find the percussionists. The triangle player seems to share the same single-mindedness as a woodpecker. There’s something oddly similar about the way woodpeckers mindlessly slam their heads against a tree at 200 kilometres per hour to the way a percussionist will doggedly count squillions of bars rest, often to no real purpose, as the conductor will invariably stop to rehearse two beats before the percussionist is due to come in.

If French horns were a food, they’d be a tomato. You know, in a kind of “Word, dude, don’t call me a vegetable, aight? Nah, not fruit either. Foot in both camps, yo, I can be anything you want me to be, baby.” I don’t know why my tomatoes talk like gangster wannabes, but you get the connection. French horns are the hybrids, the weird evolutionary cross-species. Kind of like labradoodles. They’re not purely decorative, but they’re no ‘Inspector Rex’ either.

And finally, no list of this kind would be complete without the “most important animal” (so they like to think) – the conductor. Conductors are generally like lions. There are many exceptions, but essentially they all share a kind of lion function. Officially, they are king of the jungle. But if the animals decide to revolt, there is absolutely no way the lion can eat them all.

Stay safe, kids!

* Unless being attacked by aforementioned animals, in which case read ‘somewhat irrelevant’ as ‘extremely relevant’.