Today, in band practice, I was talking to the other guy in my section about dividing up parts and solos fairly. I showed him a chart I'd made to help us get a better idea of the parts and who had them. For some reason, he became so offended by said chart that he quit. FML
Hi everyone, and thanks for the comments! It's actually an adult community band for people to just have an outlet without the stress or ability requirement of a higher level ensemble. We were both fairly new to the group. The guy in question is a middle-aged principal software engineer who is an amateur musician, while I am a first-year music teacher with a master's degree. Why I'm not in a professional or semi-professional group? I don't have the time, and there aren't any spots available for my instrument anyway (oboe).
How it was: he gave me most of the first oboe parts and took only the two first parts that had giant solos. From a purely objective standpoint his tone is terrible but since it's a low-pressure group I decided not to make a big deal out of it; and also HE was the one talking all the time about dividing up parts and solos, so I was just following his lead.
The chart was just a list of all the songs, what types of parts they had, and how many bars of solo were in each. I showed him which parts were his and which were mine and suggested that we use the information to trade some parts so he could be first more often and maybe I could have another solo (since I had next to none at that point). I guess he must have thought I was just trying to take all his solos because he freaked out and said he didn't want to deal with all this "drama" (I'm sorry, who's making drama here?) and then announced he wouldn't be back next week because he was quitting effective immediately.
End game: I DO now have all the solos. One of the clarinet players also plays oboe, so he stepped in, and keeps vehemently refusing every time I offer for him to play first or have a solo. He isn't very good, but neither is the rest of the band. After all it is supposed to be just for amateur fun.