Alice Bachini also has some interesting musings about the appeal of classical music.

Music by famous pre-C20th composers is very controlled and ordered and tidy, compared to the stuff that came afterwards. It's pleasing to the ear in ways that make total unquestionable sense, like the harmonies of the spheres. It reassures one that all is well and the miraculous patterns of the universe are reassuringly both unfathomable and still in place.

During the twentieth century a critical mass of people, and I know exactly the feeling myself, lost the urge for tidiness, many advanced-thinking romantics already having lost it during the nineteenth. Something to do with the fact that the world was felt to be getting too tidy. While achieving tidiness was a desperate battle for almost everyone except a few stately home owners, art expressed that same yearning, for a utopia that was as controlled and unmessy as the everyday world was uncontrolled and messy. The wildness of nature used to be regarded as just badness to be subjugated, and turned into ornamental gardens.

But once Everyman finally moved into the Utopia of Tidyness, otherwise known as suburbs, life became intolerably organised for Young Everyman, and crazy rock and roll conquered the universe.

My suggestion for re-establishing the popularity of classical music: a serious but not completely fatal global nuclear war.

Incidentally, the piano sonatas of Beethoven don't sound quite as sweet and nice to me as they evidently do to Alice. But most of them are pretty much like that, I do agree. Beethoven, sweet and nice? Yes. He wasn't all raging and cursing and triple forte.

However, Beethoven's music must have sounded very different to his contemporaries. We hear the similarities between Beethoven and what went before. They heard the differences. And even we can hear that the Hammerklavier Sonata is somewhat disruptive of the harmonies of the spheres.