Music Prof: All Music Today Is “Classical” – Music Styles Interact/Blend/Recombine

From my own teaching of introductory music classes, I can report that today’s students still listen to classical music—but they don’t single it out as anything special or elite. Armed with laptops, tablets, smartphones, and iPods, and assisted by iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, and other online resources, they consume vast amounts of music on a daily basis. And they have astonishingly cosmopolitan palates, happily taking in reggae, heavy metal, gamelan, hip hop, grunge, salsa, jazz, classical, klezmer—and much more, in equal measure. It’s all one playlist, it’s all music, and it’s all “classic.”