Abstract
For the past two centuries, the culture of Western art music has consisted largely of the consumption of earlier repertories: music surviving its time, heard and reheard as a model of excellence. Already in the late 1780s, an association of Viennese noblemen headed by Gottfried van Swieten had Mozart adapt the score of Handel’s Messiah (composed half a century earlier) to meet contemporary performance needs. Around the same time, Johann Nikolaus Forkel started working on a multi-volume anthology of historically significant Denkmale der musikalischen Kunst before focusing his efforts on a stand-alone, awe-inspiring biography of J. S. Bach. Among the results of this anthologizing, Bach is still celebrated today, but few people know of Johann Kuhnau, his predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig and a highly esteemed composer-scholar. Music by Bach and Beethoven was included in a 1977 LP launched by NASA into space to represent humanity to (potential)...
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