I share Bill Pirkle's interest in classification (not because I'm a
frustrated librarian or bug-collector, but because boundaries are always
going to be interesting places to look when you're trying to understand
things) and also in AI, although purely from a spectator's perspective.
I've also been on this and other musical mailing lists long enough to have
been round the "definitions" topic for "music" and "classical music" a good
many times.  Like, I think, many of us here I'm not over-enthusiastic about
opening it up again only a few months after we last did it - so perhaps I
could refer Bill to the list archives.  Towards the end of September 1999
there was a thread called "Concentrated Listening" which might be worth
looking at, and there have been several others covering similar territory.

You find the list archives by going to our noble moderator's world-famous
website (http://www.classical.net/).  There's a link to the archives on the
home page.

Bill Pirkle wrote:

>Kevin has offered an interesting term - "art music".  Maybe we should be
>talking about art music instead of classical music.  That works better
>for me since we can tie it in to the issues involved in the other arts -
>painting, literature, architecture, dance, etc.

I'm not too keen on that term because of the implied snobbery on one
side of it and the implication of lack of value on the other.  But it's
been used quite widely and it's as good as anything else, as long as it's
inclusive enough to include other things than just what my friends and I at
college, many years ago, used to call "straight music" - i.e.  the Western
classical tradition in its widest sense.

It seems to me that one of the (many) defining characteristics of
"classical music" is its awareness of its own history and evolutionary
process.  Time and time again, classical musicians have looked back to the
past for inspiration, and reinterpreted what they found in contemporary
terms.  This has been partly because of the written record - scores, and
commentaries and other writings about music - and more recently through the
recording process.  Arguably this self-awareness is becoming more evident
in rock and jazz, but not to anything like the same extent (yet - another
fifty years and things might be different).

Ian
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