which it necessarily follows that "old" and "new" are terms as relative as "up" and "down" . History 17th century By the second decade of the 17th century, the idea of cultivating the stile antico (as exemplified by the music of Palestrina) had become a conscious effort at historicism on the part of composers of the seconda pratica, or stile moderno. Francesco Soriano revived Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli (with "improvements") in 1609, and the next year Claudio Monteverdi, until then a staunch adherent of the stile moderno, composed his Missa in illo tempore, a parody mass based on a motet first published in 1538 by Nicolas Gombert. Monteverdi published his mass together with his Vespro della Beata Vergine, a sharply contrasting work of the seconda pratica . 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries incorporated traditional chorale melodies into numerous of their major works in such genres as the cantata, chorale prelude, chorale fantasia, chorale fugue, chorale motet, chorale variations, oratorio, and Passion. Like composers before them, Johannes Brahms and Max Reger composed variations on themes taken from earlier composers (e.g., Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, op. 24, and Variations on a Theme by Haydn, op. 56a; and Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach, op. 81, and Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, op. 132). Stravinsky derived much of the musical material for his Pulcinella from the work of various 18th-century composers. Creating new music that closely follows the style of an earlier composer or period has provided a creative outlet for both major and minor masters. Mozart, whose music was richly informed by his contact with the antiquarian music circle of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, exhibited a particular gift for the baroque style in such works as his Suite in C Major (sometimes subtitled "in the style of Handel"), KV 399 (385i), which includes an ouverture, allemande, and courante. (A fragmentary sarabande and Eine kleine Gigue, K. 574 also document his skill as an historicist composer.) In a letter to his father of 7 February 1778, he proudly states, "As you know, I can more or less adopt or imitate any kind and any style of composition" . A more eclectic approach to historicism in which multiple historical style influences are evident was adopted by Louis Spohr in his Symphony No. 6 in G Major, op.