Imagine if the only musical artists from the 1980s you had access to were Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson. Others, such as David Bowie, Whitney Houston or George Michael are not available because, we’re told, these artists fail to exhibit the same type of creativity as the other three “geniuses”. It’s clearly madness, yet this in a nutshell is the gatekeeping situation that exists in classical music today.Zoom back to the 1780s and the musical landscape was astonishingly diverse, with composers across the globe writing bucketloads of music not only for the church, but for theatres, salons, concerts and performance at home. And, contrary to what we seem meant to believe, none of this music was auditioned by a panel of experts with the “best of the best” selected for our moral betterment.But what we have access to today from the classical era is the tiniest fraction of what was composed then. And of that fraction, we hear a still smaller subset, dominated by just three composers: Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven – as classical music website Bachtrack’s 2025 statistics attest. Many significant composers haven’t survived as part of the modern classical canon. Take Marianna Martines (1744–1812), for example. She was an extremely popular Viennese composer, singer and keyboardist whose prolific compositional output was so highly rated in her own time that she was the first woman to be inducted into the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna as a “master” composer.Performing regularly for Austria’s empress Maria Theresa and sharing the keyboard with Mozart for four-hand duets at her own popular musical salons, she was at the heart of a booming Viennese musical culture. Where is her music today?Talent flourishes with investment, and Martines had it all: money, time, geography, social networks and an elite education. In fact, court poet and famed opera librettist Pietro Metastasio personally oversaw her education from childhood.Martines’ compositional catalogue is substantial, including – strikingly – several large-scale choral-orchestral works such as the impressive Dixit Dominus (1774), 12 keyboard concerti (four of which survive), and 31 keyboard sonatas (three of which survive). Her music isn’t just fine – it is exceptionally good. Just listen for yourself. So why do we not hear her music today? It wasn’t that she lacked contemporary advocates, and it wasn’t even that she was immediately forgotten after her death. Indeed, she was significant enough to have active detractors who worked to discredit her authority, as music scholar Judith Valerie Engel details in her research.The problem, then, was not absence of talent, nor even absence of recognition, but the failure of later institutions to keep investing in the conditions that ensure music like Martines’ is heard.Ensemble music – particularly larger forms such as choral and orchestral music – requires a rather different type of investment. We’re not able to access it without the complex and expensive assembly of notated scores, instruments, large spaces and dozens of people with specialist skills who know how to transform those dots on the page into musical sounds.At the root of this are repetition and publication, both in text and in sound. Text, for the obvious reason that without access to printed materials – and I mean well-edited printed materials – the music cannot be played and therefore endure. Music publishers have long been gatekeepers of musical taste, providing editorial credibility and a supply of materials to the market. This curatorial role was usurped by record producers, who determine what gets recorded and circulated – the new modern legitimising “text” of a musical work, as it were.Repetition is absolutely essential. This crazy process of putting dots of ink on paper to communicate complex sonic and emotional ideas means that musical works rarely reveal their secrets the first time they are played.In re-performance and re-recording, musical problems are solved and the infinite dimensions of the possible sound worlds are explored. This dialogue between performers does two crucial things in the establishment of a work within the canon. First, it refines the quality of performance and, with that, enhances the evaluation of the work itself. Second, the frequency of performance or recording generates familiarity – a significant driver of musical preference.My heart genuinely aches when I think about how different my own life would have been had I grown up listening to Marianna Martines’ music alongside that of her contemporaries. So many limiting myths about women’s inherent musical – and therefore artistic and intellectual – abilities might never have taken root in my subconscious. While in general the ability to produce knowledge and exert influence is increasingly moving away from historical centres of power, public reclamation of received music history still lags far behind, despite the herculean efforts of numerous musicians, musicologists and advocates.The good news is that listeners have more ability than ever to discover the music that moves them. The intellectual shackles imposed by commercial and academic institutions when it comes to deciding what constitutes “good” music are slowly losing their potency. There is no doubt though, we are now facing a new era of curatorial power in the form of AI algorithms that shape the discovery of music and much else besides. However, restorative projects such as this first recording of Marianna Martines’s complete surviving keyboard works provide that essential first step of the music’s modern publication.It is now possible for listeners to discover this music, and for musicians to begin the long, necessary dialogue with it. Only then are we able to reclaim our rightful musical heritage.Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.