In her important and provocative book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works Lydia Goehr presents what she calls her ‘central claim’ in the following terms:

Whatever one's initial reaction to this bold statement, the identification of the late eighteenth century as a watershed in the evolution of music coincides with certain other great historical changes that are commonly recognised as having affected music around the same time. All of them have to do with increased autonomy in some shape or form. In the sphere of social conditions, we see the emergence on a mass scale of the fully professional but essentially freelance composer and/or virtuoso performer who, in a way recognisably modern, invents a personal manner of livelihood by ‘commuting’ between different sources of income (selling compositions to publishers, fulfilling private commissions, giving music lessons, appearing at public concerts as director or soloist, etc.). In that of consumption, we observe the rise of music serving as pure recreation, whether in a domestic setting or in the concert hall, and the associated move into a dominant position of ‘non-functional’ – generally instrumental – music, henceforth freed from dependence on religious or secular ceremony or social activities such as dancing and banqueting. In that of repertoire, we note the formation, for the first time, of a universal musical ‘canon’: a cumulatively expanding body of performed compositions comprising what are reckoned the best from both past and present. All these developments were, of course, mutually supportive and perhaps even mutually dependent.