We focus on the great composers and what they produced, but we have to remember that they worked within a very complex and competitive music society.
Mozart listened to Haydn, but he also listened to composers such as Dittersdorf; Bach walked miles to hear Buxtehude; the radical 20th century Viennese composers like Schoenberg and Webern had their roots in the late 19th century composers such as Zemlinsky.
In the 20th century, transnational listening made the world smaller and the music more complex: Takemitsu in Japan influenced composers in the United States, Penderecki in Poland influenced composers in Germany, Maxwell Davies draws his inspiration from sources as disparate as the middle ages and the moderns.
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