CLASSICAL MUSIC IS NOT A GENRE!!!!!!!!!!!

Its mostly a specific type of process for creating and performing music, and that process is notation. The story of classical music begins with Gregorian chant, and the creation of musical notation. Since then its been over 500 hundred years of people from all over the world using that process to create some of the most divergent music imaginable. Just compare the music of Bach, to Schoenberg to Philip Glass. They are just about as far apart from each other as music could be. Their musical values are almost alien to each other, but they all have this process in common (on a secondary level they all use similar instrumentation). I think its a problem when classical music is conceived of a certain type of sound (aka sounds like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven). This is a huge limiting factor for classical music to over come, both for composer, and audience. The process of a composer using notation opens up gigantic realms of musical possibilities that could never be achieved with any other method. And the majority of these possibilities wont “sound like classical music”.