What section of an orchestra is sometimes known as the 'kitchen sink department'?

The Percussion section of the orchestra consists of all the instruments that you hit or shake to make a sound. There is a huge number of different instruments including drums, bells, gongs and even xylophones, earning it the title 'The Kitchen Sink Department', because everything except the kitchen sink is included.

The percussionist must have a good knowledge of music. Some instruments such as the xylophone are capable of playing tunes, so the percussionist must be able to read music notes. All percussion instruments require a very good sense of rhythm and knowledge of how it is written down. While a rock drummer gets by with a few basic rhythms, ad-libbing drum rolls and so on where appropriate, an orchestral player must play exactly what the composer wrote down.

The percussionist also needs to keep quiet for long periods when no percussion is required. Players are expert at counting bars (the musical measure of time) so that they can sit twiddling their thumbs but still come in at the right place. Legend has it that one percussionist left the stage during a performance, kept counting bars in his head while he attended the birth of his child in the hospital across the road, then came back in on time with a drum roll at the end of the symphony.