Robert Peters asks:

>What exactly is classical music?

Not to be rude, but this kind of question is pointless.  Anyway I will
try to explain something very easy, yes, easy because well documented.
Classical music is the IMPROPER name of everything that is considered
by "distract people" as old western culture music, without electrical
devices. Culture is the key of the definition, because "classical" music
is made of culture. In fact, classicism (from where the adjective classical
derives), is a roughly defined period from about late-mid XVIII century
to the first quarter of XIX century... the definition "classical" derives
from romanticism (I presume), where they tried to break and enlarge the
bounds of the style of the preceding era, even taking completely different
directions (Liszt and so on, boycotted by the very conservative Brahms
with an historical manifesto...); so since our society is still romanticism
- remnant, the word is now tied to the concept.  Anyway, just to enlarge
this already horribly bad-written-English post, I always prefer to make
a serious distinction between just two kinds of music: intellectual and
commercial.  Intellectual comprises many forms of human expression, also
early jazz (mostly black), avant-garde, renaissance, classical, romantic,
some weird experimentation like Aphex Twin, as this can be appreciated
only with a deeper approach by the conscious listener... commercial is
a term well suited for any music made to ride the fashion, just to sell
and catch the attention and fix the melody in the brain of any distract
man and woman in the world, but also for minimalism, which is masked as
"intellectual classical" by the media but any 2nd year composition student
could make something like that, just for fun. Of course I am not talking
about Master Gyorgy Ligeti's minimalism, which is very complex yet
minimal... sorry for the pun.  Hope my efforts will be useful to clarify
the concept.  Best regards,

Fabio B.