Is classical music...?
just a sophisticated type of music? I don't see a lot of criteria except for some basic structures such as rhythm, tonality, etc. I mean Debussy almost brought the concept of not having bars. Therefore, there is no way you can classify. you can certainly say if it's Baroque, Medieval, Romantique, Classical, Impressionistic, etc. But now with all the contemporary music composed, there is no way you can recognize certain pieces as classical or non-classical.
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new can of worms .... you are great at opening them ... how do you define the greater genre of Classical Music (not the era you people I KNOW the difference) can we eliminate movie scores? if we do ... do we then put Prokofiev's Battleship Potemkin and Walton's scores and Virgil Thompson's Louisiana Story out of classical music and what about the incidental music composed for plays? chuck them out with the bath water .... how do you categorize much of the music on video games?? it really doesn't fall into any other category .... should we throw Orff out for writing O Fortuna ?
I love this question which in the end has no answer, ... except ... time will tell
EDIT I guess every group needs a curmudgeon and I nominate Malcolm ;))
Classical music is, for the most part and I my humble opinion, no longer created. After WWII the few composers left became 'distracted' by commercialism and wrote music no longer as art, but more "to order." Evidenced by the likes of Vaughan Williams and William Walton composing music for film. So composition of classical or art music rapidly petered out to the point that the likes of Cage were taken more seriously. In fact Cages infamous 4'33" may well mark the end of classical music (indeed perhaps that was his intention).
Now most attempts at creating art music are unlistenable, trite and pretentious. So we had 300 or 400 years of classical music, time will only tell what history will make of music created after the war - from my perspective it has been a slide into crass commercialism. [I'm waiting in hope for beauty to return and someone to show me that I am wrong]. So I guess the categorization that you are asking for no longer exists.
There is no good term for it. "Classical" refers to a period in music history, roughly 1750 to early/mid 1800s, but when most people say classical they're referring to anything from Monteverdi (renaissance) to Rachmaninoff (20th century) and beyond. I use terms like "music directly descended from classical music," "music you study if you major in music in college," or "contemporary classical music." Most broadly you can say that it's music written down note-for-note (sometimes not) for classically-trained performers to play. It is an issue laden with gray areas.