ABSTRACT
Music and heritage-work have long gone hand in hand—whereby past musicians and musical works are celebrated, and music history is (re)cast in terms of their impact. Across more than a century, for instance, individuals and organizations in the US have constructed an infrastructure to extol certain orchestral composers. This infrastructure—which included symphony orchestras, record companies and university curricula—has gone from emphasizing a few exemplars like Beethoven and Mozart to emphasizing an expanding range of composers from the past. Given the extent of this heritage-work, orchestral music in the US has often been described as “classical music,” a term that unfortunately glosses over the supply of orchestral composers and compositions from the present (Dowd 2011; Dowd and Kelly 2012).
