AI music slammed for sounding like Beethoven — critics in 1799 said the same of Beethoven
deanwball · x · 2026-11-11
When a critic mocked AI-generated music for trying and failing to sound like Beethoven, law scholar Dean Ball pointed out the irony: the criticism reads exactly like reviews of Beethoven himself in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the main music journal of his day.
Ball shared a Claude translation of a contemporary review of Beethoven's Op. 12 violin sonatas: "Herr van Beethoven goes his own way. But what a bizarre, laborious way it is! Learned, learned, and ever more learned, and no nature, no song!... a piling of difficulty upon difficulty, until one loses all patience and pleasure."
"I've never felt history repeat itself more explicitly," Ball writes.
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