Anachronistic Vertical Musical World View

I find this paragraph from Richard Taruskin's "A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century" interesting food for thought:

To composers imbued with a nineteenth-century worldview, artistic traditions are transmitted "vertically." Nineteenth-century music historiography is an epic narrative of text arranged in single file. It assumes that artists are primarily concerned--whether to emulate or to rebel--with the texts of their immediate precursors. These assumptions have led to an obsession with lines of stylistic influence, with stylistic pedigree, ultimately (and destructively) with stylistic purity or worse, progress. This is the altogether anachronistic view most classical composers still imbibe in college or conservatory.