Bernard Chasan:

>Joseph Sowa states that the western art really started with Bach, Telemann,
>and contemporaries.  They were the first generation of the well-tempered
>tuning, and the first of the diatonic music.
>
>This leaves out a host of great seventeenth century composers at the
>very least, and seems to me profoundly arbitrary.  There are Monteverdi,
>Schuetz, the Gabrielis, Palestrina, Byrd, just to name a few great
>composers in the great tradition of western music.

Joseph may have been talking about harmonically-based, rather than
modally-based music.  Even so, he leaves out late Monteverdi and others,
definitely earlier than Bach and his contemporaries.

Steve Schwartz