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Notes -
Scattered thoughts.
In favor of your thesis: There was something going on with the Western music during the Enlightenment. Mozart was a contemporary with the enlightenment. Beethoven started his career moving to Vienna right on cue with the War of the First Coalition.
Against: There was a great deal of unequivocally bad music, too. It was an era that produced Portsmouth Sinfonia (transgressive and subversive, but of the kind where you stare at the subversion too long).
Written by the victors: Did the adults in the 1960s music like the music that now gets called great? Did they think they were seeing a peak in art, or where they scratching their heads why nobody is making new subversive Lindy Hop. (I once met a guy who lamented how the big band exited the popular consciousness when rock become ascendant, and thus, last of good music died.)
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