Currently streaming on the excellent Cinobo platform—besides the excellent documentary produced by the Greek National Opera, Mary, Marianna, Maria: Callas’s Unknown Greek Years, which I highly recommend—is a Danish series chronicling the adventures of the members of an orchestra. In fact, it is described as a version of The Office, a truly iconic series that recounts the adventures of employees of a paper company in a small American town. The Danish series is called Orkestret, or in simpler Greek, The Orchestra, and it depicts the adventures of a group of people whose profession is to play music. The orchestra, as is well known, is an idealized and somewhat romanticized situation. All artists, playing music to earn a living. However, transferring this work structure to the level of the daily routine of an office in a small, obscure town like the one described in The Office is a different reality.

But how much does an orchestra resemble people in an office selling paper? The answer is both a lot and a little. Firstly, we are talking about people who all have many years of demanding and difficult studies in their field. In contrast, being a good salesperson does not necessarily require specialized and arduous studies, but rather other—equally important, but different—skills. Secondly, an orchestra is made up of artists. Now, whatever one’s idea of how an artist is described, it is good to bear in mind that artists, especially successful ones like those who have managed to become members of an orchestra and have therefore undergone particularly demanding evaluation processes, have decided to enter a professional arena that has serious requirements and involves continuous and uninterrupted evaluation. This evaluation does not only concern whether someone will keep their job but also public acceptance. Believe me, no musician playing in an orchestra wants to perform in front of empty seats. Deep down, they know very well why a theater’s seats are empty, and there is a serious possibility that the reason for the audience’s absence is their own playing and artistic performance.

I may have said a lot about the differences, but it’s worth mentioning something about the similarities, as orchestras are made up of people who are difficult, easy, good, bad, grumpy, strange, kind, affable—all sorts of people, in other words. Being an artist doesn’t automatically make you a kind person; not being an artist and selling paper, as in The Office, doesn’t automatically make you any less strange. The same basic human characteristics are found in every work environment, and a person, if stripped of the external characteristics of the particular skills their job requires, is ultimately one and unique, with all their pros and cons.

After all, it’s not the first time an orchestra’s life has become a series or a film; consider Mozart in the Jungle or films based on life in an orchestra. Look at the caricatured figure of “the maestro,” as he demands to be called by others, a character from the iconic comedy Seinfeld, which you can watch on Netflix, and then let’s realize that music is something different from the lives of the people who play music, which can otherwise be as utterly boring and routine as one can imagine.