Andrys Basten wrote:

>...  Some of the most inventive writing was done in the 17th century
>and is not austere or stark, as you know.  Froberger is emotional, ironic,
>devilish in his harmonies and just isn't stark, nor is Frescobaldi!  Nor
>Louis Couperin though he's less adventurous.  As others have said, the
>same for Locke, Lawes (H and W), Marini, Castello, Uccelini, Turini, early
>Purcell, whom, actually, young listeners today would find of interest at
>least as an adjunct to the great forms that came later.

As Romain Rolland had his hero, Jean-Christophe, consider, as he lies dying
at the end of the novel of the same name, which first appeared about 1910:

   "He saw clearly...how surely all modern music was doomed to destruction.
   More quickly than any other the language of music is consumed by its
   own heat; at the end of a century or two it is understood only by a
   few initiates.  For how many do Monteverdi and Lully still exist?"

Walter Meyer