Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A flyer for a 2025 concert series — Chamber Music San Francisco’s season in Palo Alto — which I was about to toss without further attention (it’s been many years since I’ve been able to go to concerts), when I looked at the address: it was mailed to Conrad Zwicky at my home address in Palo Alto.

How did that happen?

First, it turns out to be relevant that the mailing comes from a chamber music society.

Second, it’s relevant that the only Conrad Zwicky in my experience is a distant cousin in Switzerland; I’ve posted a number of times about Conrad and his wife Salome and their sons. A fascinating family, to whom I am pleased to be related, however distantly (through the little town of Mollis in canton Glarus, where the Zwickys come from). But I’m quite sure that Conrad has never lived on Ramona St. in Palo Alto; I’m pretty sure he’s never even been to Palo Alto.

Conrad and his family are people of many accomplishments and interests, but what Conrad’s truly famous for is as a composer and performer of, yes, chamber music (and though Salome is an otolargyngologist, she’s also a professional soprano, and she and Conrad often go on concert tours together).

So Chamber Music San Francisco got my address from the mailing list of a chamber music concert series that I used to subscribe to in a long-ago previous life, but somehow this list got hybridized with a databank of chamber music composers and performers. I suspect the associative zeal of an AI data management system.

I am, however, a bit miffed that Conrad got the flyer and I didn’t get one.

This entry was posted on June 3, 2024 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Music, My life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.