Music historians tend to focus on what might be called “big events” when discussing the revivals of composers. While such an approach can make for a concise and appealing narrative, it can lead to the mistaken impression that forgotten composers were rediscovered overnight. Every music history textbook makes sure to mention how Felix Mendelssohn's performance of J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829 led to a phoenixlike revival of Bach's works, catapulting them from a forgotten corner in the world of keyboard pedagogy to a central position in the Western canon. The same might be said of Claudio Monteverdi, whose Orfeo gathered dust for nearly three centuries before Vincent d’Indy's 1904 revival repositioned the opera as the first masterwork of the Baroque era and its composer as epoch-making.

A byproduct of the big-event revival narrative, no matter how much one might understand it to be inaccurate, has been a tacit assumption that composers whose music was not apparently rediscovered in one seminal moment were rediscovered through the work of musicologists. These more scholarly revivals appear in various guises, including lost works rediscovered (or made available) or a fresh historical perspective that leads to viewing the music as more significant. The early music revival, for instance, relied heavily upon scholar-performers’ ability to find, analyze, edit, and publish forgotten works while simultaneously researching their contexts and performance practices as accurately as possible. The increasing abundance of research on the so-called Kleinmeistern of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stands as a more recent scholarly-based revival, albeit one still confined to a relatively small circle when compared to the early music revival.

The problem with both the big event and scholarly revivals is that they both drastically oversimplify the process of music reception. When one peers beneath the surface, these large-scale changes in critical reception quickly become messy and ungainly to the point where one might miss the proverbial forest for the trees. A good case in point is Palestrina, whose revival predated the early music revival, did not involve a single big event, and which involved a wide variety of nineteenth-century musical figures.