[Julie Steiner]

A few years ago I had a long phone conversation with someone who said he would donate lots of money to the nonprofit choir on whose board I serve—IF we would sing nothing but Bach cantatas.

Bach wrote so many of them that we could go years before we needed to repeat them, and each is absolutely perfect. According to him, there was no need for any composers after Bach to write any songs at all.

"Not even Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff...?" I asked.

"No! They have several outstanding pieces, but their overall output can't compete with Bach's. Bach alone is enough."

I said, "Well, the San Diego Master Chorale has always presented music by a variety of composers, including living composers setting texts by living poets, and I don't see that changing. You might be interested in the Bach Collegium of San Diego. But even they don't sing only Bach."

"Yes, I know! Outrageous, isn't it? I've scolded them about it several times, but they keep on programming these lesser lights. It's false advertising to call themselves the Bach Collegium. I won't give them a dime."

If he's determined not to enjoy Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Rachmaninoff's Vigil and Vespers too much out of loyalty to Bach, he's free to feel that way, but the rest of us are going to go on delighting in them.

Ditto for the works of A.E. Stallings, Wendy Cope, Richard Wilbur, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and even us slobs on Eratosphere. People are going to go right on enjoying the best works of these, even though they weren't written by Shakespeare. Why does there have to be only one composer or poet worth remembering?