Ten experts decide who and what changed the course of music history.

If you were a musician in the 17th or early-18th century, and wanted to widen your musical world by travelling to another city, or even to another country, there were two main forms of travel you could take. You either laced up your boots, and walked – one thinks of young Bach journeying some 260 miles on foot from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear the aged Dieterich Buxtehude play – or, if you had more money, you took the stage coach. Even then, its speed was pretty dismal, averaging around 4mph, so it could take you a week to travel even to another region in your land, let alone to another country.

It is not surprising that Bach never ventured outside Germany. Towards the end of the 18th century, mail coaches started plying regular routes, reaching dizzying speeds of 10mph, and with the advent of properly metalled roads, the reliability and speed of coach travel improved, but it was the advent of the steam train (and eventually its floating cousin) that enabled musicians to travel from city to city, country to county and finally continent to continent...