We are talking about beginning classical music *lovers*, not apprentices to
the post of Keeper of the Canon.  (Who in the world added "received" to it,
btw?) For listeners, there is no "heartland", no obligatory repertory one
must go through, no basic repertory - the nice thing about any art is that
to appreciate it, you can start ANYWHERE.  Britten (who actually made it to
the canon a long time ago) or Copland or Glass is just as good a starting
point as Mozart or Bach.  Let's put it in perspective: here we have a
person living at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, and you claim
that the only right way to appreciate at least a millennium - more like
1-1/2 millennia - of Western music is to start with a few 18th-C composers,
writing in a system and idiom that have been dead for more than a century
and which didn't exist for many previous centuries.  Why insists on
artificially narrowed view of music???

-Margaret Mikulska