Stereotypes are as rampant in music as they are in the rest of human interactions. So when you’re a French Horn, everybody expects you to act like a French Horn.

So, berets, striped shirts, croissants, escargot et vin, oui oui? Nein – lederhosen und bier. The common French horn is actually German. (The English Horn is the French instrument, you silly billy.)

Brass instruments have been around for millennia, and because they have the capacity to be LOUD, they were used to communicate over long distances, either in war (charge! or, retreat!) or in the hunt (we’ve managed to catch a single fox/boar with no less than 20 men and 100 dogs!) To make matters worse, valves (keys) on brass instruments are a relatively new invention (late 19th century); without valves, they are somewhat limited in the number of notes they could play. If you think about the pitches heard in a typical brass fanfare (eg, the theme to Masterpiece Theater), that’s pretty much what brass could do before valves were added. Modern brass instruments are able to play any pitch, and are capable of a huge pallet of tone colors – but it’s hard to shake old stereotypes. They still get more than their fair share of “ta-das” and “too-ta-ti-toos.”

But despite all the negative effects of this musical stereotype, the brass do what they do really well. Fanfare for the Common Man wasn’t written for the glass harmonica, after all. So, here is a rondo from a Mozart horn concerto which makes me want to go and chase foxes. Not boars, though. They’re scary.

If you like this, may I recommend this funny song by Flanders & Swann. It requires a very specific sense of humor, and an acute understanding of British pronunciation – namely, that the English consider “horn” and “gone” to rhyme (not to mention “burglar” & “pergola”)

Yup. I’m a Beliber.

The violin family of instruments reached a point of perfection around the year 1600; modern violins are virtually the same as the instruments made 400 years ago. Whenever humanity produces a new musical instrument (or any worthy invention, for that matter), humans go and push that instrument to the extreme. Enter Franz Biber.

Biber’s contribution to music includes a variety of choral and instrument music, sacred and secular. But mainly, he is remembered for his wicked violin skills, employing double stops and alternate string tunings (scordatura).

Just like Bieber, Biber had some legal issues, but no model-worthy mugshots. The Bib just skipped out on his employer, prince Karl II, for a better gig elsewhere (musicians were servants, and could not leave their royal employers without permission).

Austrian violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler is known as a hot-dog violinist and his compositions, both of which were warm, juicy, and sweet. His best-loved work is Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen, three short pieces for violin and piano that recall the sound of, well, Old Wieners (er, old Vienna).

Written in 1905, Kreisler knew this musical style was out of fashion. For some stupid reason, there is an unspoken rule that new Art Music needs to be fresh and forward-looking, and that imitating or stealing another’s music is bad. So, he attributed the work to Joseph Lanner, who was a genuine Old Wiener Alt-Wiener Viennese romantic, with no artificial fillers. Once the piece became famous, Kreisler removed Lanner’s name and took credit for the music.

I’m telling ya, you never sausage a great violinist!