The Classical Appreciation Thread

For your Bach needs I'd suggest Aaron Jay Kernis.  Kernis himself is a major Bach devotee and his works are incredibly dense exercises in modern counterpoint without heading into atonal or serial territory, and still are very Big in a sort of late Beethoven sense (think "late string quartets").

This brings up a kind of weird thing that happens when we discuss Orchestral music and Kernis is a great example of it.  In the paragraph above I've compared his work to both Bach and Beethoven.  This could lead one to assume that there would be strong similarities in the sound.  The old "If you like Yes or Genesis you'll like The Flower Kings"  type of comparison we are used to in Prog just doesn't work as well when we're crossing nearly 200 years of music history (rather than 30 in the example here).  

Kernis uses counterpoint in a dramatic and sometimes almost extreme way, but also in a way that sounds nothing like J.S. Bach.  He uses structures (form) and texture in very similar ways to Beethoven but again, this music will never be mistaken for a lost Beethoven symphony.

Both composers have quite a different concept of melody.  It is a more modern style, and to my ears, quite distinctly North American in character.  Boyer takes the large scale approach of Brahms and combines it with melodies that might be more associated with Aaron Copland (but without the direct use of folk songs) and uses all the resources of the orchestra to showcase those tunes like Brahms, Schuman or Mahler would have done.

Kernis, like Bach or Beethoven, is more interested in "development" of his material.  He uses shorter melodic fragments and works and re-works them in a sometimes bewildering number of different ways.  His music is heavily, (often intensely) syncopated and very challenging to play (or conduct, just try beating time along with the recording!)

Comparing one composer to another in this way can feel misleading to listeners more accustomed to noting the similarities between say, Porcupine Tree and Pineapple Thief, RPWL and Pink Floyd,or  Dream Theater and Symphony X etc.. The comparisons you read about in Classical music (classical style not classical era) are more in structure and concept rather than style and sound.

Classical music as a business entity (a genre with specific charts in Billboard as one example and of course there are others) is pretty well established.  It includes music for Orchestra, Chamber music played on orchestral instruments, music for keyboard instruments, choral music, opera, & art song.  In the present day the term also covers some hybrid forms such as electro-acoustic music.  But you already knew that....

The term classical music was not in use during the classical era, much like like the term progressive rock was not in use in the early/mid 70's when the genre was at its peak (commercially).  The term classical music came into being in the late 19th century and contrary to the absolutely horrible Wikipedia entry was NOT an attempt to canonize a certain body of music (Wiki lists Bach to Beethoven as the group but Bach was not even a classical era composer). The term was a convenient reference for journalists to the dominant position of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn (all composers of the Classical Era) on the concert programs of the day, but rapidly extended to any orchestral music given in concert and shortly thereafter to all the other genres listed above.

There have been a number of attempts to "re-name" the genre in the past 40 years or so and classical music is now also sometimes referred to as "art-music" or "serious music".  I believe you even referred to it in another thread recently as "tuxedo music", a name I wholeheartedly approve of in spite of having spent 25 years in the field without ever having worn a tux. 

Like Prog, classical music is a large and inclusive "umbrella" genre that includes a large number of sub-genres with a lot of parallels to prog. If we apply the nomenclature of this site to classical music we might see:

Proto-Classical / Proto Prog: The Renaissance & Baroque Eras.  The genre was just solidifying its main concept such as the major /minor key system, standard notation, and some of the basic forms (fugue, sonata, concerto). Instrumental technology was making new sounds and techniques (the improved violin and the early pianos circa 1710)  possible and composers were testing them out, but it wasn't really "classical" yet.

Classical & Romantic Eras/ Symphonic Prog  The instrumental forces The orchestra, piano and major chamber ensembles) are set in place and a group of composers (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven) make their mark using these basic groups in such remarkably creative ways that they leave their stamp on the genre forever.  All composers from this time onward will labor in the shadow of these giants.  Eventually the genre gets too big and bloated (Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler) and collapses under the weight of its overly ambitious concept works.  This fragments the genre into a number of smaller sub-genres.

20th /21st Century:  All the main sub-genres of classical music in the 20th century (what I call "The Age of Isms" in my classes) are represented in the prog world.  Primitivism, Neo-Classicism, Minimalism, and the loose group of sub-genres known collectively as Modernist (which includes serialism, experimental, and aleatoric styles)  a can be represented by Heavy Prog, Neo-Prog, Electronica, and Avant-Prog and many bands from these genres list composers from the corresponding ones as influences.

In a thread like this one I'd advise not getting hung up on the Classical vs. classical issue.  It is a very small detail in a very big picture.

Russel, I know you were not specifically referencing the Wiki article.  But I can easily imagine that folks will check it out to see what it might say on the issue and it is just SOOOO badly done. The article has so many factual errors and errors of inference and logic that I wouldnn't even know where to begin to correct it.  Entries like this are the bedrock reason that Wikipedia is a joke in any academic community and why it is a dis-service rather than a service to people in general.  A Wiki entry can only be trusted if you already know the information.  The Wiki "definition" of this term is disputed by The Grove Encyclopedia of Music, The Harvard Dictionary of Music, The Oxford Music Dictionary, and Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians just to name just a few reliable sources and, if you read the first four paragraphs of the Wiki entry,  it even contradicts itself!  

Just say no to Wiki.