CHRIS BACKLEY/ Daily Bruin Staff
Second-year piano performance student Dan Yu practices Chopin's "Study No. 11" in Schoenberg Hall.

A joke has Arnold Swarzenegger as a child playing the game "classical composers" with two buddies in Austria. His first friend chooses to be Beethoven and subsequently acts like he's a deaf genius. His second friend chooses Mozart and acts like a child prodigy. His favorite composers already chosen, Arnie concedes that, "I'll be Bach."

The joke is that Swarzenegger, a celebrity pushover known for big muscles and bad acting, has as little to do with high musical art as Jerry Springer does with Christian morals. The real irony, however, turns out to be that, if Swarzenegger really did endorse classical music, he would be anointing it with the prestige of his celebrity, not the opposite.

This is the real force behind the doom and gloom statement, "Classical music is dead." While people are still writing symphonies, going to concerts, performing Beethoven, and learning about it in schools, classical music has lost the very thing that made it classical: its legitimacy as our culture's highest artform. What is emerging, however, is a relaxation of musical hierarchies where all music is becoming an equally valid means of expression. It may not be that classical music is dead but, instead, that various forces are changing it into something unrecognizable.

"I see classical music as being very much alive. It may just not be your grandparents' classical music," said Mark Swed, music critic at the Los Angeles Times.

Not surprisingly, the new face of classical music looks more like Britany Spears than Mother Teresa. Sexy vixens, such as Vanessa Mae, the Ahn Trio, and Bond, play Beethoven and the Beatles alike. Handsome tenors, such as Andrea Bocelli and Alessandro Safina, belt out pop tunes just as easily as they would Verdi, whose arias were themselves the pop tunes of his day.

Similarly, modernist composers who once disdained anything popular are now reaching out to a broader world. Classical composer Philip Glass has collaborated with David Bowie and Michael Stipe while fellow composer Steve Reich collaborated with popular DJs on an album of dance remixes of his works.

All of this new classical-meets-pop stuff comes under the convenient category of postmodernism (modernism being the esoteric idea that music must be purely abstract and disconnected from the popular world). Arnold Schoenberg (the namesake of UCLA's music building) created his dissonant 12-tone method ensuring audience rejection, Schoenberg's elitist pride and joy.

"I think that Schoenberg, in particular, tried to build a wall which did not exist before him between the street and the concert hall. Myself and others in my generation have been responsible for taking the wall down," Reich said.

This wall, also known as the classical canon, began circa 1830, when Beethoven's nine symphonies were considered to be the end of the symphony. The canon basically defined a repertoire of masterpieces and created a strict criteria for what new music could be allowed into the concert hall. They defended their ivory tower with complex music that further alienated people.

"Part of it was that Boulez and these people were getting a bit too theoretical and polemical. That scared people away," Swed said, referring to the extreme modernist composer Pierre Boulez. "Suddenly, you start to think, 'My God, I have to understand this and know what's going on.' People don't worry about that with Beethoven."

Now, every musical style conceivable is game for classical music. While Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" was an early pop-jazz-classical hybrid, now composers use various folk influences as the rule, not the exception. New, young composers at UCLA find their inspirations equally in diverse styles.

"I've always had a tendency to reference the folk music of the world around me since I grew up playing more rock and jazz than anything else. I've been moved a lot by music that academia calls simple," said Aaron Rothe, a second-year music composition student. "At what point will I be completely separated from the popular world? Probably never."

In fact, Rothe's newest work, premiering next Tuesday in Schoenberg Hall, mixes a classical wind ensemble with a jazz combo, including drums, that even references reggae at one point. Welcome to the brave new world of classical music.

After 25 years, the Kronos Quartet remains innovative, performing with casual attire (not tuxedos) and theatrical lighting and sound designs. They perform music that is emphatically non-European (their newest album, "Nuevo," features works by Mexican composers) and non-classical (which include collaborations with rock bands such as Sigur Ros).

Indeed, the Kronos list of works performed reads like who's who, with people like Tan Dun, Reich, Dimitri Shostakovich and Boulez along side James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.

"I can see a kind of fusion of interest where avant-garde pop and new music might meld together," Reich said.

Of course, freedom is scary and often gets confused with chaos. Stravinsky's famous statement reads that great music must have rules. The problem arises when classical music attempts to define in precise terms what those rules are.

"There's lots of serious music out there, with people interested in sonic experimentation and listening to sounds, everything that classical music is supposed to be about except that they don't think of it as classical," Fink said.

Serious art music can now be found coming from people who haven't studied classical music. Electrical engineering students, such as Aphex Twin, may be just as likely to come up with new sounds based on an understanding of technology. In addition, classical music students are defecting to the pop world for profit margins. Opposite fusion occurs, too, with pop musicians funneling their talents into a pseudo-classical realm. Paul McCartney's symphonic poem "Standing Stone" received a prestigious Carnegie Hall performance.

The failure of classical record sales cannot be exaggerated. Forget metals such as platinum and gold. A few thousand units sold can push an album into the classical charts.

Independent record label Naxos, however, is working against this tide, recording and selling classical repertoire at low prices. Without celebrity performers, such as Bocelli, Naxos markets their CDs under the composers. Major labels have noticed Naxos' success and are releasing their own budget classical labels. Warner Brothers, for example, has Apex.

Perhaps the best case for classical music recording has been film music, which tasted the success of pop with James Horner's "Titanic" and John Williams' "Star Wars." Now the people's love of great films are translating into love of its music.

"I'm a very popular lecturer at famous universities," said film scorer Paul Chihara. "People are packed in them, because it's cool now at the university to study Bernard Herrman ('Psycho') or Williams. Movies are very much like operas of the 19th century. People went to them for the fun of it, not because it was high art. For a long time, classical music didn't have that."

Now classical composers are gaining attention through the incorporation of various styles, including rock, to create new hybrids. Also, the future promises new technology that allows more access to diverse music through the Internet. Forces such as prog rock and minimalism have taken on the classical role of providing challenging intellectual compositions. Electronica and hip hop especially point to new ways of conceiving music.

"You could imagine in 2075 music instruction in schools would mean learning how to use a computer, how to sample sounds and construct beats. If you were really interested in some weird, specialized stuff, you might go off and actually learn to play a musical instrument," Fink said.

The only real promise of the future is time, allowing musical prejudices to dissolve away.

"The music of Gregorian chant is now so completely decontextualized that people now consume it as pure sound, and they actually like it. I don't see why Beethoven couldn't function that way as soon as the whole idea of classical music has been allowed to be put aside."