Along with Hollywood film scores, AAA game soundtracks are seemingly the only place where modern classical music composition thrives.

Dig a little deeper, there are plenty of modern classical music composers. Just last year I saw the opening of John Adam's Become Ocean and it was fantastic modern classical music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGva1NVWRXk

There's a lot of great game music out there, but the orchestral stuff is generally derivative of Mahler and Strauss. It's a genre that was plausibly modern 75 years ago, but isn't today. I would love to see games expand beyond the cliche orchestral action style, but I understand with so much money on the line that nobody wants to take those types of risks.

Who do you consider to be modern? I'd like to check them out. I haven't investigated classical music in awhile, but the only artist I know of that I've heard be considered modern is Stravinsky, and his most popular pieces are about a hundred years old themselves.

Bartok and Messiaen are probably the next ones to check out after Stravinsky. In terms of harmoic/rhythmic sophistication, Messiaen still sounds as modern to me as the recent/current orchestral composers (Adams, Carter, etc).

It's not really classical music, since classical music is a style that clearly refers to a certain era of music composition + game music is hardly anything similar to classical music in the first place.

"Classical" (big "C") refers to the period, but "classical" (little "c") is often used to refer to the vague, nebulous cloud of music to which it often refers and of which Classical music is a subset. I know that's super pedantic and nebulous, but I've never heard a satisfactory term for the broader category. I've heard "Western Art Music", but that implies that Western music outside of its umbrella isn't art, which is plainly ridiculous. So, I use "classical", because it's the least bad term I've heard.

even more pedantic... modern refers to the early 20th century period, the period we live in is contemporary. so modern classical: stravinsky, contemporary classical: john williams... same applies to design and architecture.

Naming a period in art "modern" is like naming your file "final.doc". You just have to know there will be "copy of final(4).doc" in that directory at some point.

Good point, thanks.

I'll refer to it as symphonic music as now on. (though this leaves out chamber pieces :( )

(Though we do refer to even late-romantic period pieces well into the 20th century as "classical" unfortunately)

The reason I make the distinction is that there are very specific composition trends and rules that make a musical piece "classical", and contemporary game or movie music is not following those at all.

It's not because music is played in an orchestra that it's the same genre as the popular orchestra music that was played x00 years ago. Unfortunately most people don't make (knowingly or unknowingly) the distinction.