• Customary folklore, tradition
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Dominik Smith
• Date Collected: 2-28-18

Informant Data:

• Dominik Smith was born in San Diego, California on October 28, 1996.  According to Dominik, he has been playing the cello from a very young age, 6 to be specific. He said he fell in love with idea of cellos and being a cellist at the age of 6 after watching Yo-Yo Ma playing the Cello with such passion on television. Currently, Dominik is a junior at Dartmouth College. At school, Dominik is a member of the Dartmouth Symphonic Orchestra (DSO) as a cellist. He is majoring in physics and math.

Contextual Data:

• Cultural Context: Within any group of students/peers/friends, there is always some sort of “humor.” Going off of this idea, there is definitely a a lot of humor related to instruments and practices in any orchestra. And like any type of humor, mostly everyone in the orchestra becomes aware of it at some point in their life. Since there are many sections within an orchestra, each section being its own instrument, they would probably have their own range of humor.
• Social Context: This item was mentioned when I asked Dominik about any instances of humor within the cello section. He knew immediately of a joke that he had laughed so hard to when he had first heard it, and knew it be the perfect item for this project topic. He said the joke was told to him by his cello teacher a few years after he had begun playing the cello and was thinking about switching to the viola. He said that his cello teacher had actually heard this joke from one of his previous students, who had apparently come up with it.

Items:

• The item of folklore that Dominik mentioned during the interview was related to children’s folklore, since he had learned of it as a child and the joke was created by another child of her age. The joke goes along the lines of, “After finishing rehearsals, the orchestra group leaves for lunch and the instruments are left in the room. After a while, the conductor realizes the room wasn’t locked, so he rushes back and finds that all the instruments were stolen except one – the viola.” The explanation for such a joke is that violas (and mostly all wind instruments) are considered the worst instruments in the orchestra, and for most pieces their existence isn’t even required. So the violas weren’t stolen because they were deemed worthless compared to the rest of the instruments.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file): Where the violas are situated and how it relates to the joke (even though they are closest to the conductor, they were still left behind by the robbers).

Transcript:

• “My cello teacher told me this joke, in order to dissuade me from switching to the viola after having trouble learning some harder techniques on the cello.”

Informant’s Comments:

• This is Dominiks’s third year at Dartmouth, and he says that being part of the DSO has been a great experience so far.

Collector’s Comments:

• Dominik was very easy to interview, and actually remembered the whole joke which was very helpful.

Collector’s Name: Aditya Srivastava

Tags/Keywords:

• Children’s folklore
• Humor
• Violas
• Cello
• Cello Teacher
• Orchestra