I think there's a lot more than a fine line between classical and world.

Do you consider Silvestre Revueltas world music?

Don't get me started on Lord Weber.

Piazzolla is a first class composer!

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Feargus is a violinist who I regularly perform Astor Piazzolla's Histoire du Tango with and Aisling is an Irish flautist who I also explore his shorter tago works with for example the Libertango etc

He had a flare and development within his tango that is emotional and technically really demanding, there is a great pure truth about his music.

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I suppose we could have a long argument about how to classify composers who use a lot of folk idioms in their music, and composers who write folk (or world) music.

But most composers tend to use folk melodies every now and then, even big names like Bartok and Prokofiev did. Revueltas used them also, but the end result...yikes! There's really no way that you could classify Sensemaya as anything other a big orchestral showpiece. It's primal. It's powerful, but it's still classical. Additionally, he wrote chamber music, song cycles, etc.

Piazolla wrote tangos. Lots of tangos. As far as I can tell, no symphonies, no concertos, no chamber music. More to the point, no absolute music. Tangos. Just tangos. And I would suggest that as a popular dance form, you should classify it with the World Music. Which is not to say that popular dance forms don't appear in classical music, the foxtrot from Ravel's L'enfant comes to mind, but pretty much as isolated incidents, as it were. Putting Piazolla in the same company as - say - Gustav Mahler just doesn't fly.

Which is not to say it's bad music. It's not. The tangos are very good. And they should be kept with the World Music.

T

Radiomute didn't like my Cyrillic name, so I had to make do.

T

Perhaps, while we're thinking about this, we could discuss whether, and to what degree, we consider early music (pre-renaissance, pre-16th century) classical music.

T

Piazzolla wrote concerto's, for guitar and bandoneon and violin, premeired by the Assad Brothers who are widely regarded as the world leading classical music duo, also the classical violinist Fernando Suarez Paz almost legendary in violin circles was a great exponent of Piazzolla's composition.

Piazzolla studied composition with Nadia Boulanger at The Paris Conservatoire of music, there is much more to his output than you have heard chernobog. He has written in a serial style at one point in his development. His tango's will obviously appeal to the masses as it is an evocative and emotinal style of writing.

Many of his longer Chamber works like L'Histoire du tango actuallly quote and reference Stravinsky and Prokofiev, the last movement of his famous 4 movement Histoire du tango is full of developed writing with a complex relationship between flute and guitar.

Writing symphonies etc is a title structure and name that we have stuck onto music.

Piazzolla's works are not for the average performer, to bring off the depth of emotion and feeling within his music need a wealth of technicak brilliance and control, thats why people like gidon kremer record his music and vanessa mae doesn't, but flip that over vanessa could record vivaldi and obviously kremer could. Much of the worlds 'Classical' music doesn't develop and is full of infantile like themes with very little development etc.... some of it is the exact oppostie. Piazzolla has much more than just tango and he is up there with some of the most talented composers in the world.

'absolute music'?

Anything in the right context is absolute music

that depends on what your definition of classical music would be...

Oh, but his true art is the Tango!

Okay, Merula...I didn't expect that, but to my credit:

That's not what the original post was about and "nuevo tango" sure as hell isn't classical music. I don't care how much Schoenberg he hides in his basement.