I don't know anything about the history of music, so I'm wondering

What caused the huge shift in musical taste during the 20th century? I feel like, while music tastes always changed, there is a sense of continuity from medieval music to Baroque music to Romantic music. Bach, Beethoven, and Brahams all have their own unique style (both from their own sensibilities and from the musical culture surrounding them), but you can see how one naturally leads to another. However, once you get to the 1920s music completely changes in a way that has no continuity with the music that came before it. Even modern classical music sounds completely detached from the periods before it. What gives? Why did music change so suddenly in the 20th century?
Pic related, it's me

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Probly mass media- radio, tv etc

Two things:
>technology
>death of tonality (when speaking about classical music)

Also see

imperialist culture industry. Modern "culture" is a scientific experiment in manipulation and mental enslavement created by internationalist plutocracts who have come to the conclusion that global conquest through conventional warfare is not feasible.

woa.. woke bro

Be as sarcastic as yoou want, doesn't change the fact that the world is rapidly moving away from local cultures to a singular global unit, from cultures based around building on top of the old to that which is engineered to be consumed and discarded within a short cycle. It's specifically designed to multiply, spead, and take over, like a cancer.

the "break" of the fin de siecle in europe is really not so strongly detached from the rest of western art music as you're making it out to be, op. listen to some romanticism into impressionism into expressionism and you'll start to see the links as far as the avant-garde modern classical stuff goes. and there was a whole neoclassical movement that continues to inform through minimalism into contemporary composing practice on the tonal side.

the rest of what you're experiencing is just that the music of the people of the past is not as well documented as the formal traditions that would get written down and preserved, and now many more people have access to their idiosyncratic types of music being heard. but there is an obvious sonic rupture with the introduction first of electrified instruments and then the full move into synthesizer music that expanded the boundaries for what could even go into a musical piece that accounts for the hugely heterogeneous nature of music now. not too complicated. if you can have literally any sound be part of a composition, there's really no limits for how out there you can be.

but there is an interesting thing where there's still moves to explore the capabilities of different kinds of ensembles to recreate sounds. zeitkratzer's play pres is a cool example of a contemporary ensemble being able to recreate sounds that were thought only possible on tape in the middle of the twentieth century. anthony braxton's ghost trance music stuff continues on some really interesting innovations in use of voice carrying on from a tradition i know much less about but would say is similarly interesting as when schoenberg first recommended singers speak-sing on pierrot lunaire.

based schizo

Or rather, humanity has a natural desire to join together and unite, and this has only been feasible on a global level within the last 50 years, so the change is faster than you are comfortable with

Doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing though.