In 1736 Janitsch revolutionized the music world with his weekly Friday academies (Freitagsakademien); This was the beginning of the upheaval from the courtly to the bourgeois concert scene. Die Freitagsakademie is now presenting its favorite works from Bach to Beethoven. Es gibt keine alte Musik! [Early Music is alive!] True to this credo, the Bernese music ensemble Die Freitagsakademie plays music from the 17th to the early 19th century in a wide variety of instrumentations and on instruments of the respective period. Following the example of the Berliner Freitags-Akademien [Berlin Friday Academies], which were established by the composer Johann Gottlieb Janitsch in the first half of the 18th century, the ensemble Die Freitagsakademie [founded in 1993] is dedicated to playing baroque and classical music on period instruments and in historically informed practice, freeing this music from its museum dust and the wrong kind of reverence and turning these compositions into music of today, into captivating contemporary art.