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there are alot of reasons for "classical music" as you describe it being as it is.
first off, however: you understand, i assume, that classical music is not one thing any more. hasnt been for years. if you check out the spectral composers, for example, you find interesting combinations of traditional (notation) and contemporary (timbre, overtones, microtonal tunings/intervals) concerns. from folk like scelsi through radelsecu and scarriano.
as for musique concrete: i can understand why a classically trained player would find tape music threatening, i guess. but at least try to think about what it reacted to, and what it is about. tape music is one of the most important things that splintered european classical music ideology---it shifted the focus of many folk away from sounds as produced by traditional instruments to all sounds. cage can be seen as trying to figure a way to maintain the traditional position of composer and assimilate the implications of tape music at once. there have been several waves of debate about cage--the most interesting to my mind unfolded around folk like la monte young and pauline oliveros in the early 1960s (san fransisco)...but there have been others...around questions like whether one had to follow cage into chance operations or whether he opened space up for a variety of other types of practice, some of which worked to undo the old, dysfunctional split between composition and improvisation, composer and performer, etc.
as for your remarks about schoenberg etc.: you need to open your ears. for myself, i do not think that all serial/post-serial music is equally interesting, but there is some amazing stuff written through these constraints--what i take much of it to be about is transforming the sense of space you can work with, eliminating the need for repetition, exploring the implications of silences between notes. stockhausen's klavierstucke are about the most recent pieces i can think of that i find fascinating and that work out of serial constraints.
seriously..............open your ears.
on the other hand, not everybody has to like everything, so there we are. i guess there is always some level of demand for folk who find 19th century european classical music to be interesting. there are some beautiful things floating about in the sea of dreck that is the 19th century tradition. i like listening to other people's performances of some of them. but i find nothing compelling about the tradition because it is tradition, nor about the assumptions that underpin performing it.
european classical music is at this point just another set of possibilities for thinking about/organizing sound.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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