Growing up, I always enjoyed hearing the nicknames given to various musical instruments. We were told that the organ is the “king of instruments,” while the harp is the “queen of instruments.” The bassoon is “the clown of the orchestra,” and, at least in jazz circles, the clarinet is the “licorice stick.” To play the piano is to “tickle the ivories.” The drums are the “skins.” Both the terms “horn” and “axe” can refer generically to a person’s instrument, whatever it may be.
Then we had “Tubby the Tuba,” personified as a chubby boy, and who can forget that the oboe was the duck and the clarinet the cat in Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”? And in Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals,” the string double bass aptly plays the elephants, the cello the swan, and the xylophone the skeleton bones. In “The Instrument Song,” the horn sounds “so forlorn.” The instruments are truly fascinating, especially to children.
