making a choice

Mike Glyer tells an anecdote about going out for pizza. In this instance it was just a joke - the two outlets he was asked to choose between were, unknown to him, almost adjacent - but it illustrates something that really irritates me.

I hate it when people ask me to make a choice between two options I know nothing about, without providing me any basis on which to make that choice. This often comes up in much more serious contexts than going out for pizza, especially medical ones. And then when I ask for guidance, all I'm told is "It's your choice." I know it's my choice! I'm trying to gather information with which to make that choice!

a small concert

It was held in one of the tiny side chapels of Stanford's humongous Memorial Church, out of lack of expectation of a large audience, and, indeed, those who came out in the wet on a quiet Wednesday evening just about filled up the chapel. It was titled "In & Around G: An Exploration of BWV 1019," and if you wonder what that means, "BWV 1019" is the catalog number of a Bach sonata for violin and continuo in G Major. Anthony Martin, with an appropriately crisp, dry sound, was the violinist, and the continuo was provided by Robert Huw Morgan, competent but uninspiring, on the portative organ, and John Dornenburg, less uninspiring but also less competent, on the viola da gamba.

The sonata has 5 movements, but several of them exist in multiple forms (in multiple keys, thus the "& Around" part of the title), and we heard all ten possibilities in this concert, mixed in with four full (but shorter) sonatas by Dietrich Buxtehude, the older composer who was Bach's inspiration for much of his earlier music. In his talks interleaved among the movements and sonatas, Martin discussed the famous occasion on which Bach walked 200+ miles to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude play. He made much of figuring out exactly how far it was and how long it would have taken Bach to get there, which reminded me of the statement I once read that Bach wrote so much music it would take 75 years to copy it all out, which I thought was interesting as Bach only lived to 65, and had much else to keep him busy: time-consuming performing-musician jobs, fathering twenty children, and walking to Lübeck.