How many here listens contemporary classical music

Yes, there is definitely an interface between prog and New Age, as well as prog and classical.  As far as straight up classical guitar goes, I love the usual suspects:  Andre Segovia (RIP), Christopher Parkening, Julian Bream, Scott Tennant, Liona Boyd, Elliot Fisk, Narcisso Yepes (RIP), John Williams (the OTHER one, who incidentally was in a nice Prog band called Sky), Kim Chung, among others.  My all-time favorite is Christopher Parkening, as he could play pieces by Bach like nobody's business.  But, I like different guitarists for different pieces.  Julian Bream plays my favorite Bach piece, BWV1000, really nicely.  Segovia and Kim Chung played Recuerdos de La Alhambra beautifully.  Still, Parkening was so good at changing his tone based on hand position, especially on pieces like Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.

I listen to some Philip Glass, also quite familiar with Michael Hedges.  I feel that Kitaro moves in and out of both classical and New Age (and enjoy some of his work as well).  Another composer I enjoy who seems to do both, at least to my ear, is Ludovico Einaudi.  I like some New Age, but want it to not be too airy and light.  I'm not fond of super-discordant modern classical, however, either.

Hi,

A lot of the earlier electronic music was much more difficult to listen to than it is today ... when a lot in our ears has already listened to enough of it, that it allows the listener to make a comment about the music, but the biggest thing about the early day stuff is that a lot of it was experimental, and I go way back to the FORBIDDEN PLANET soundtrack, and then to the 60's with the likes of Beaver & Krause and even the Tibetan Bells series that came out in those early days which were not electronic, but really, almost had the same feel when you were listening ... what is this all about?

Beaver & Krause were, however, more into making sure that the synthesizer was not strange and could create some sounds that your ear could resolve, a lot of nature sounds, and stuff that became well known and respected by a lot of later generation synthesizer folks ... including TD.

Nowadays, I have not heard enough to make a judgement, however there are quite a few exploratory piano/synth players and their stuff is interesting, but I can not say how it fits with electronic music, although it does not "sound" to me as if it was meant to be a classical styled composition ... since the sound side of things is more important, it seems, than the ensuing music put together ... but this is a bit of another story since the ability to mike and amplify these things, now allows for sound creation that was rarely there before ... like for example, it used to be bad and insulting to use your hands to hit the piano itself (not the notes), but after everyone saw KE do it many times (Rachel Flowers shows it well several times -- much more visible in the piano/organ versions of his music), it became normal ... I have albums by one woman in Japan that does this a lot on her work ... and it is amplified and touched up by sound effects to a small degree.

But, honestly, to me, the stuff that Vangelis does, that Ryuichi Sakamoto does (for the most part), the stuff that Kitaro did (and still does? Haven't listened lately to him), was "contemporary classical music" to my ears, as was Tomita, although some folks have commented that he was just an interpreter not exactly a composer! Even Mike Oldfield fits, although I think that in his last few years he has been more repetitive than he has been creative, and I think he just needs to get out and go smell some flowers and enjoy a little more life, and stop being stuck in the cocoon that mostly allows him to only repeat himself ... even his sister has evolved more, and is now much more interesting than he is.

I'm a big fan of Philip Glass, so much so that I started a PA blog for him, although my hopes of finding other Philip Glass fans here were shattered like a Glass House.

An interesting phenomenon btw. is when people from the classical world are trying to turn rock into classical. The results are not always successful. I once heard a CD with orchestral versions of songs from The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon; it was insufferable, and very much felt like a trivialization of the original music to me.

I also very much prefer the original Low album to Philip Glass' Low Symphony.