Ding ! Dong ! The Witch Has Died.

[jochanaan]

I would agree with Kyle that listening to mediocre 18th century music is much preferable to mediocre late 20th century music...

I wouldn't--but maybe that's because I haven't heard a lot of mediocre 20th-century music except on the non-classical charts!

zappa & zorn aren't classical composers, though they have touched that world on occassion. and minimalism is kind-of a joke. i'm sure there are plenty who are of the classical tradition-learning who do write scores, perform, pool resources, are members of groups, and even produce their own recordings, we simply don't hear about them through the major media channels though, or even the classical media marketing lobby who endlessly promote dead & over-rated guys like Mozart & Beethoven ad nauseum and which all the sheep automatically flock to, no different than the sort of thing you see with pop and how people will mindlessly flock to what they are told is good...so for those who are really into music, it becomes a specialized interest and you have to really dig around and put in extra effort to find the really good stuff.

You have a point, but less of one than you might imagine.  Despite the record dictators, uh, producers' attempt to keep "classical" and other genres in their own niches, a lot of great musicians from both sides of the divide insist on crossing over to explore the other side; think Gershwin, Bernstein, Golijov and even Yo-Yo Ma with his Silk Road Ensemble.

It might be an interesting debate, whether the record producers nearly killed great music and whether their apparently impending demise is a good thing...