I like traditions

I like having traditions. I like the familiarity of them; to me, they feel like something to cling to in a world that too often seems to shift like a pile of sand under one's feet.

Because of how I live, I don't have a lot of "traditional" traditions: I don't have children so there's not the series-of-marks-on-a-doorpost showing the annual growth of said child, there's no first-day-of-school pictures. There's no anniversary to celebrate and I don't even generally do that much to mark my birthday (in recent years, anyway, it seems I'm frequently in the throes of my late-winter respiratory infection on my birtAhday).

But I can make a few of my own traditions. I've mentioned before that I like to buy some small toy that either my brother or I would have enjoyed when WE were kids and donate it to Toys for Tots or to some other organization that provides a Christmas for children who might not otherwise get much of one. And I have my most-mid-fall-break trips to Longview (and have one tentatively planned for this fall).

And I have one first day of school tradition I've done the past few years. Brahms' "Academic Festival Overture" is one of my favorite pieces of music (and I also love the story behind it: apparently Breslau wanted Brahms to write a piece of music for them, and thought they could bribe him with the flattery of an honorary degree, and Brahms, being a bit, perhaps, curmudgeonly, decided to do what we today would call a mash-up of student drinking songs.

The funny thing is, to an academic living in these greatly debased current academic times, even the old drinking songs sound grand and almost joyously pompous*. (And yes. It is possible for pomposity to be joyous). I admit on good days this is the soundtrack I hear in my head as I walk across campus.

(*Compared to some of the country-pop or rap that blares from the pickups of the students driving by. I like Brahms a lot better than, I don't know, Blake Shelton or someone like that. And anyway, "Student Drinking" in the European universities of Brahms' day seems to have been different than the average "Delta House" frat party Americans think of. And many of the drinking songs were in Latin, and at least one of them was banned for political reasons; it was the theme of a pro-unification student group(of the various German sub-states; that was an issue prior to 1870).

So, here once again, is a version of Brahms' grand and pompous Academic Festival Overture, this time conducted by Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic (Or Wiener Philharmoniker, if you prefer)