Harryrages - there's no one definition and the boundaries are, as usual fuzzy. You can get a reasonable idea of what is conventionally regarded as classical music (in the sense your post meant) by looking at one of those introductions to classical music. The Rough Guide is a good example. I brought myself up on the excellent Musical Companion edited by Bacharach, later called the New M.C.

I would include as a start, the music composed by a named person from around 1200 onwards in Western Europe, for church, court, patron or personal use. Early names include Dunstable,Taverner,Dufay, Jannequin, Palestrina. The stream spreads to the Americas, Russia and the colonies from perhaps the 17th century.

The prime places to catch classical music live are the concert hall, recital room and church. i'd include Tudor music - madrigals and stuff in the category.

One quick way to get at what's in it is to mention other traditions. Folk, Jazz, Popular and Pop (with their innumerable subdivisions), Military, World Music, New Age. Film music is a category that can belong partly in popular, partly in classical.

Subdivisions of Classical include Orchestral, Chamber (say 1 to 15 players, Opera, Ballet, Church.
Orchestral includes symphonies, Concertos, Overtures, Tone Poems, Suites; Chamber includes duos, trios, quartets,quintets etc. for many combinations of instruments.
The categorising has become mind-bogglingly complicated in the last 100 years with all the types of ordering breaking down. Music didn't have to stick to one key, or a few rhythms, familiar forms (as just outlined), the usual instruments, the normal venues. It even became clear whether something was music at all, or what music was.

Classical music is thus the most iconoclastic and revolutionary category; the others have staid (!!!!!) relatively conservative by comparison (jazz least so). For example, the shape of most popular songs hasn't changed vastly since they began (there are exceptions. There always are.)Hence much classical music of the recent period gives a lot of people a headache.

In some respects, classical and jazz and the most avant-garde of pop have moved nearer each other, so that these days, with some stuff, you might be very unsure where you are.


   So, actually, asking someone if they like classical music is somewhat like asking them if they like restaurant meals, to which the reply ought to be "Some of it." And is unlikely to be "All of it."

One way to think about classical music is to imagine what somebody could come up with if they were serious, sensitive, imaginative, funny, OR opinionated people (or any combination), and who had decided to express themselves in those kinds of aspects of themselves in music as distinct from through words, sex, manual work, sport or whatever.


   Ivor