In 1965 he became an assistant at the Musicological Institute in Kiel, where he received his doctorate in 1966 from Anna Amalie Abert with a thesis on the topic Parody and Borrowing in the Work of Christoph Willibald Gluck.
[2] Hortschansky's main areas of research were the music of the Franco-Flemish School and operas of the 18th century.
Since 2001 Hortschansky has been a full member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.
In the same year he also became a member of the Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt [de].
In the Frankfurt University Library exists the "Hortschansky Collection", microfilmed copies of about 2000 Italian opera libretti.