Exclusive: String quartet drops ‘far-right’ cellist

Bruce says:

I’ve been reading an article — or, more accurately, the comments on an article — about estrangements within families, where a child cuts off contact from their parents, or siblings stop speaking to each other, etc. There are a fair number of commenters saying things like “but this is your family” and “why can’t you just agree not to talk about politics or religion?” and bemoaning the fragility or even cruelty of modern kids, who cut off contact with their perfectly loving parents because of a bad haircut when they were seven years old.

I’ve learned a couple of things from the reader comments (the article is not actually very good, but it sparked a lot of interesting discussion). The main thing is that you can’t ever see into the relationship and/or all the reasons behind the break. Even members of the same family remember the same incident differently. (One commenter mentions “the oboe solo that never happened,” where she froze in a youth orchestra at age 15 because of stage fright. It was one of the most scarring and humiliating incidents of her young life, but her family thought it was hilarious and never failed to bring it up at family gatherings for decades, despite repeated requests to drop it. At some point it stops being about getting over the humiliation when you were 15 and starts being about your family not giving a shit about your feelings.) When a person cuts off contact, it can look from the outside like the person is just being oversensitive. What you may not know about, because the person doesn’t want to tell you about it, is the years of sexual abuse by the father, sanctioned by the mother. Instead, the child who cuts off contact is easily judged to be a snowflake by the people who think that what they can see is all there is.

So with all that in mind: I’ll just repeat the often-repeated trope that a string quartet is like a family …maybe in bad ways as well as good.