Right back to Stephen A. Emery

As someone in the Patent-Producing and brainstorming biz, I've always been intrigued by processes which purport to amplify the production of big ideas, e.g. the Kage Roi brainstorming room, which unfortunately seems to have gone to ground. This morning I re-stumbled across a New Yorker article on Intellectual Ventures, a patent mill that has recently been in the news for some smartphone-related lawsuits and came across this quote:


You know how musicians will say, ‘My teacher was So-and-So, and his teacher was So-and-So,’ right back to Beethoven?”


Actually, I have never heard a musician say this, and assuming he may have meant "composer," I'm not sure most composers can actually make the claim of "right back to Beethoven" anyway, although maybe a lot of pianists, since Beethoven taught Czerny who taught Liszt who then taught everybody.  But, curiosity having been raised, I decided to follow my teachers back a few generations where I could, limited this morning to the resources of the Internet, having lost personal access to Grove's in the divorce, and by means of so doing, arrived at the genealogy below, where the dots signify a depletion of precedence in my simple search. Some more famous nodes could be seen if I had included cousin or sibling relationships, as Horatio Parker is best know as a teacher of Charles Ives, and Dukas and Debussy were classmates.



richard grayson
 henri pousseur •
robert arthur gross •
andrew imbrie
 nadia boulanger
  gabriel fauré
   camille saint-saëns
    fromental halévy
     luigi cherubini •
  charles-marie widor
   françois-joseph fétis
    françois-adrien boieldieu •
 roger sessions
  horatio parker
   george whitefield chadwick
    stephen a. emery •
   josef rheinberger •
  ernest bloch
   iwan knorr •
john chowning
 nadia boulanger (above)
gerard grisey
 olivier messiaen
  maurice emmanuel
   léo delibes
    cesar franck
     anton reicha
      josef reicha •
      antonio salieri
       florian leopold gassmann
        johann woborschil •
      johann georg albrechtsberger •
  marcel dupré
   louis diémer
     ambrose thomas
      jean-françois le sueur •
  charles-marie widor (above)
  paul dukas
   théodore dubois
    louis fanart •
   ernest guiraud
    fromental halévy (above)
 györgy ligeti
  pál kadosa
   zoltán székely •
   zoltán kodály
    charles-marie widor (above)
  ferenc farkas
   leo weiner
    hans von koessler •
   albert siklós •
   ottorino respighi
    giuseppe martucci
     paolo serrao •
    nikolai rimsky-korsakov
     mily balakirev
      mikhail glinka
       charles meyer •
  zoltán kodály (above)
  sándor veress •
 karlheinz stockhausen
  olivier messiaen (above)
 iannis xenakis
  olivier messiaen (above)