I've never been a fan of classifications, and this discussion has done
nothing to change my mind.  The only good reason to classify is in order to
understand better, but I'm not sure what we can learn by putting music into
one or the other category.  We already know which music is/was popular and
which is/was unpopular--the contemporary documents tell us--and to me the
far more interesting question, to which I have no answer at the moment, is
"what makes music 'popular,' that is, liked by a wide variety of people?"
What we call classical music can be very popular (most of Verdi's operas,
for example); also, adaptations of that music ("A Fifth of Beethoven") can
be very popular as well.  Why does that happen?

I am emphatically an elitist in my artistic tastes:  I believe there is
good music and mediocre music, and those distinctions apply in every genre.
I revere Mozart's C minor Mass but don't think much of La Clemenza di Tito;
I love "Can't Buy Me Love" but abhor "Silly Love Songs," and so on.  (Which
doesn't mean I don't have my guilty pleasures, like Mendelssohn's early
piano quartets, ELO, and a 1970s rock arrangement of Grieg's Piano Concerto
called "Asia Minor" by a group named Kokomo.) What makes music good vs.
mediocre is, I think another interesting question, one which the early 21st
century, used to relativistic thinking, finds itself ill-equipped to
answer.

Peter Goldstein