Early music is based mainly on the music of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras. Many
             people like to define Early Music as ending in 1750, with the death of J.S. Bach. This is a handy
             date, but it misses the various stylistic changes taking place around that time, i.e. the emergence of
             the gallant and pre-classical idioms in close proximity to the final flowering of the baroque proper.
             To add even more confusion, this is also not clear-cut. As with everything else, Baroque music
             ended gradually and sporadically, if we are to say that it ended all. Perhaps the significant factor
             defining these eras as "early music" is that they do not have a continuous performance tradition. In
             other words, this music ceased to be performed after its time had passed and needed to be revived
             in our own era. This is not true of the "classical' music of Mozart, Beethoven, et al. Which
             possesses a continuous performance tradition. This means that, to some degree, it is this revival
             which dominates EM (that is, early music as a movement), at least in spirit. Of course, things are not
             clear-cut here either. For instance, late Baroque composers like Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and etc.
             Were revived relatively early and therefore have a fairly long performance tradition which is not
             dependent on the present early music movement. Now we are seeing an increasingly large number
             of performances of Mozart, Beethoven, and others in the content of early music; this further
             muddies the waters. There is the question of pre-Medieval music. While early musicians would
             undoubtedly be happy to claim it as their own, unfortunately there is very little surviving evidence
             about music from earlier times. Indeed, there are no music manuscripts from Western ...