Twilight of the Nerocrats? - By David Pryce-Jones - David Calling - National Review OnlineThe euro may very well be enjoying its fond farewell within a matter of days. And if the currency goes, then the European Union will also be no more, as the German chancellor and the French president moan in chorus. At which timely moment, the Daily Mail reports a special contribution of the Brussels bureaucracy: Musicians may no longer be allowed to play instruments whose strings are made of the traditional cow gut. The prohibition was apparently brought in a decade ago; there were dispensations, but these are not being renewed.
Oh, how they care for our well-being! They’ve spotted a health risk. Nobody has ever caught mad-cow disease from a stringed instrument, but you never know, they just might. Not long ago, these bureaucrats put a similar ban on organ pipes. Nobody in a thousand years has been ill from the lead content of organ pipes, but again they might have been. Never mind that we shall never be able to hear the music of Bach as he heard it. Think of the committees and the hundreds and perhaps thousands of hours spent on correspondence, consultations, and drafting the means to achieve this peculiar end, when with any luck all 25,000 of these paper-mongers will be sent back to their own countries by the end of the year, and have to begin paying taxes into the bargain. The precedent of the Emperor Nero playing his fiddle, I find, has come to mind.
Bach-ing mad: EU could ban orchestras from using cow gut for strings
They are lauded as some of the greatest works of European culture.
But even compositions by the likes of Bach, Vivaldi and Purcell aren’t safe from the Brussels busybodies.
Performers warn it may soon be impossible to play such music as the composers intended it to be heard because of EU rules restricting the manufacture of traditional cow gut instrument strings.
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