3 ms·

Would you be willing to provide an alternative statement that you view as analogous?

• geofft 9y ago
  It's kind of hard to think of something exactly analogous, but something I think is pretty close is "If you want the choir to be balanced during the quiet parts, get rid of the all the loud basses." People don't choose whether they're basses, like they don't choose whether they're white men. It's ambiguous without context whether this is an implication that all basses are loud, or that there are specific basses who are too loud and the rest are fine - but it certainly could mean the latter. (There is enough of a tradition in musical performance that stays barely on the ironic side of ironic bigotry of making fun of certain people for their instrument or vocal part, so the former isn't an unreasonable possibility.) And certainly there might be sopranos or altos or tenors who are too loud, too - but for the immediate problem of solving balance, the implication is that's not the current problem. If someone in my choir kept going on about how the basses are too loud no matter what they objectively do, I would tell them to cut it out, and I would hope that the choir director would get rid of them if they persisted; it's pretty demotivating to be told that you're doing something wrong no matter what you do. But if we actually have a problem with auditioning too many basses and it's hurting the sound of the choir, and some of them are just not good at singing quietly, getting rid of them is the right thing to do (unless this is a school choir or something where participation is a more important goal than sounding good).