Its own beast  

I blogged about this before, but now that ArtsJournal actually has its temporary blog (the idea seems to be to have an online conference) Critical Conversation up, you should go take a look. The discussion looks to be quite lively, and there seem to be a LOT of people writing, all about the greater context and future of classical music. An excerpt:

I think we're going to see a partial collapse of the boundary between so-called classical music and neighboring spheres in the popular arena. We'll see an increasing interchange of roles: two harbingers are Steve Reich, who's become an icon of modern electronic music, and Jonny Greenwood, who's launching a career as an avant-gardish concert composer, or, more accurately, resuming the compositional career that the world fame of Radiohead interrupted. Then you have someone like Björk, whom I'm writing about now, and who lives in a lovely Icelandic world where all these distinctions are boring and marginal.