> I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century.
People were complaining about the loudness war in _classical music_ in the early 19th century, unfavorably comparing Beethoven to his predecessors, and how his imitators were ruining music. Human nature doesn't change, and the phenomenon of people having their taste in music frozen in their teens and twenties is not something that was invented with the phonograph.
“It is not surprising that Beethoven should, occasionally, have entertained blasé notions of his
art; that he should have mistaken noise for grandeur, extravagance for originality, and have
supposed that the interest of his compositions would be in proportion to their duration. That he
gave little time to reflection, is proved most clearly in the extraordinary length of some
movements in his later symphonies… His great qualities are frequently alloyed by a morbid
desire for novelty; by extravagance, and by a disdain of rule… The effect which the writings of
Beethoven have had on the art must, I fear, be considered as injurious. Led away by the force of
his genius and dazzled by his creations, a crowd of imitators has arisen, who have displayed as
much harshness, as much extravagance, and as much obscurity, with little or none of his beauty
and grandeur. Thus music is no longer intended to sooth, to delight, to ‘wrap the sense in
Elysium’; it is absorbed in one principle—to astonish.”
Letter to the Editor in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, London, 1827