Happy New Year
January 1, 2019
HAPPY NEW YEAR to readers of this site. May the upcoming year bring you many good things, and may you continue to take part in the happiness and holiness of the Christmas season.
We have a tradition here to celebrate this day by listening to selections from the Vienna Philharmonic’s famous annual New Year’s Day concert. The orchestra has held a concert each New Year’s Day since 1941. (Here is information about this year’s concert.)
During its 160-year history, the Wiener Philharmoniker, with its characteristic “Viennese Sound,” has been led by many of the greatest conductors and praised by famous composers such as Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms, Mahler (who conducted it from 1898 to 1901) and Richard Strauss. The waiting period for weekend ticket subscriptions is 13 years. The New Year’s concert, which always features Strauss waltzes and ends with this rousing version of Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March under the chandeliers of the Musikverein, decorated in recent years with huge displays of flowers from Vienna’s gardens and shops, is especially popular and is broadcast on PBS in this country.
Members of the orchestra have openly stated in the recent past that the ideal member of their ensemble is a Central European man. They have even gone so far as to state that the orchestra’s sound can only be achieved by musicians who possess the appropriate cultural “soul.”
The Philharmonic did not allow women to become full members until 1997. Between 1997 and 2010, a period during which many other orchestras became heavily female, it hired only three women. Paul Fürst, a violist, once stated in a documentary on women conductors:
There is no ban on women musicians playing here but the Vienna Philharmonic is by tradition an all-male orchestra. Our profession makes family life extremely difficult, so for a woman it’s almost impossible. There are so many orchestras with women members so why shouldn’t there be – for how long I don’t know – an orchestra with no women in it … A woman shouldn’t play like a man but like a woman, but an all-male orchestra is bound to have a special tone. [Wikipedia]
Perhaps when listening to this rousing march, you will agree that though it can be enjoyed by men and women, it is made for an all-male orchestra. Is that because women are “inferior” to men? What a ridiculous idea! Top musicians typically succeed partly because of the devotion, support and musical insight of their mothers and wives. Men have been inspired to play and create beautiful music by women. No, it is because men and women are different. Let us rejoice this year and always in the true diversity — not the multicultural, feminist glop — that God in His great wisdom gave us. Let us this year and always reject the modern campaign to impose a sterile homogeneity on mankind.
— Comments —
John writes:
Thank you for your musical entries. Actually, I was very inspired by the Robert Shaw Angels We Have Heard. I went and watched his “making of a Masterpiece” which shows the inside method of how he teaches. It is absolutely a miracle, highly recommended.
I also loved the Vienna piece. You really can hear a special sound from them, fascinating. I didn’t expect that. But I listened to it after I read it, and was startled by the sound. I’m going to start listening to them specifically.
Sady, I have been bullied several times by women in musical situations. They get together and make one’s life miserable. I really wonder, in most normal courses in life, if men should have anything to do with women outside of necessity.
Women can be absolute assassins. Smiles and emoticons, and then wham.
Laura writes:
Thank you for writing.
There are a number of reasons why coed orchestras — and the coed workplace in general — is a mistake. I get the impression there is a lot of extra-marital activity on some of these orchestras. When men and women travel together and spend much time together, it’s a huge temptation.
John writes:
The cultural dogma is that men and women are interchangeable outside raw biological features. Men and women must be thrown into 6-8 hours a day together in an intimate working environment. They must, that’s the dogma. And when problems arise. Guess who is at fault?
Actually, my journey to Traditional Catholicism started in the “mens rights ” movement that I think you have referenced before. Haha! But it is no joke. If God is oppressive, men must be oppressive too! And if God is driven out of our lives, so must [masculinity] be driven out. Look at the “handmaidens tale!” I don’t subscribe to the mens rights movement, but there are some good points they bring up.
Laura writes:
Feminism claims that women are morally infallible. The men’s rights movement claims that men are morally infallible.
Catholicism claims we’re all a mess. And the Church sees men and women as radically different.
