Yeah classical is a weird but interesting one, even just a phrase to describe a type of music.
I think classical music as a term is a very strictly defined one due to it’s closeness to academia. the prestige and elements of elitism that has come with it (not saying it is inherently elitist by default, but you can’t deny the relationship that classical music has with class or social stature, especially in the UK) make it quite difficult for any real conversation to be had about what actually can be considered within the conversation of what it is or what it consists of. And then one step further from that, what can be considered to be a modern interpretation of it or relation to it.
An example would be when a Neutral Milk Hotel track was played on Classic FM or a BBC classical show (I forget which). I’m not trying to say that neutral milk hotel are classical music, but similarly to more commonly discussed styles on this forum there’s a lot of crossover between genres and their foundation or structure.
Without getting into the semantics of classical being pre 1900 or whatever and if we talk about the parallels of the popular understanding of the genre term “classical music”, and composition as a form; there’s a lot of really interesting stuff you can bring into the conversation.
For instance, there’s a lot of similarities between Jazz and Classical, especially some of the more left field post war stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAbRCRBD0qM & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY8ImEEwS9M
Nik describes what he does as ‘zen funk’, and there’s a lot of closeness to Jazz in other bits of his music, perhaps even a much more comfortable proximity than to classical or contemporary forms for sure. But I think this is a great track, and certainly one of his which has a more traditional contemporary/classical style to it than others.
There’s also a lot of parallels between ambient and contemporary music - Murail is from the french music school IRCAM and did some really wonderful stuff there with spectral composition. Worth a read on if you have the time and the interest. Xenakis is great too if you liked Murail’s style.
Gibson played with Glass and that’s how he’s more commonly remembered, but the composition on Cycles is a perfect example of texture and timbre as composition. Very easy to see the similarities between Eno etc. with this Gibson piece here.
I’m procrastinating from helping with the gardening here so I’ll just summarise that to me what classical is as a form is composition; but then it’s evolved into contemporary with a more nuanced and thoughtful approach to composition.
You can also talk about the western centric ideas in classical music too, such as world music and it’s composition, and the way that classical is a juxtaposition of folk, the semantics of the term classical music and a few other things but fuck it.
And I’m aware I’ll look like a massive twat too if I’ve wrote an essay on contemporary music and you want something that fits the bill perfectly of classical music, so here’s Shaham playing Dvorak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5hs_2rzzI