Looking over the sweep of music history, we often like to think
that the greatest composers are naturally the most original,
that they have something to say that is theirs alone. However,
many of the most renowned composers were not innovators, but
consolidators. We consider J. S. Bach greater than Vivaldi, but
it was Vivaldi, Corelli, and Tartini who developed the
revolutionary string-writing techniques that Bach fused with the
German traditions of counterpoint to fashion such gleaming
treasures as the Double Violin Concerto. Bach’s son Carl Philip
Emanuel was not as talented as Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven, but
the sensitive style of C.P.E.’s symphonies and keyboard
works—quick shifts of dramatic mood, complex and emotionally
charged harmonic progressions—loosened the linear strictures of
Johann Sebastian’s style and reintroduced an element of the
irrational and intuitive into Western music that would resonate
far into the Romantic era. Debussy and Ravel were giants, but
musical Impressionism would not have