Talking of polls

Readers, I come to this post with a heavy heart. Everyone who has been reading normblog for any length of time knows about its tradition of polls. But the last one - enjoyable though it was - has wiped me out. The work. No, I should be frank - the toil. At once back-breaking, eye-straining, time-consuming, WotN-exploiting and hyphen-dependent. It's just too much. I have to learn the lesson of the past so as not to regret the future when it has in turn become the past.

You'll know by now what's coming. A hard, painful decision. You're right.

The next poll has to be easier on the normblog Polling Organization. And so it's going to be. I'm allowing you fewer choices, and the topic of the poll is one in which there will be a much greater convergence, or - if you prefer - much less of a spread. Because there's a canon, you see. (No, not a cannon.) And there are far fewer eligible candidates than there are rock songs.

Something a bit different this time. We've had country, we've had jazz and we've had rock. Now, I'm wanting to discover who you, the normblog readership, will choose as your top classical composers of all time. Does 'top' mean best or just best-loved? That's for you to decide. Either way, you have five choices each, and I'm asking you to rank them. I'll be giving 5 points for a first-place ranking, 4 for a second, and so forth down to 1. If you come up with tied positions, I'll divide the points across the relevant positions. So composers at joint first will score 4.5 each; five unranked composers will all score 3; and so forth, according to the formula p + q +.../n.

For previous polls I haven't revealed my own hand until late in the day. This time it's different. I'm giving my choices straight off:

1. Beethoven.
2. Bach
3. Mozart
4. Schubert
5. Brahms

Not very daring? Too bad. It's what I would have said yesterday and last week and two years ago, and it's what I'm very likely still to be saying two years on. Am I telling you this in order to influence your own choices? Not a bit of it. I know you are all people of great strength and independence of mind. Oh, and there's a certain blogger who hasn't yet submitted an entry for any of the normblog polls whom I'm hoping to be able to entice on this occasion. Can you guess who I mean?

Closing date: Sunday March 6.