What most people call "Classical" music now is really an large umbrella term for instrumental art music written in tonal forms prior to the 20th century on a ce

What most people call "Classical" music now is really an large umbrella term for instrumental art music written in tonal forms prior to the 20th century on a certain class of instruments and with vaguely homogeneous views on what music should be and includes Baroque, Classical, Romantic and a few others. It is semantic nonsense to quibble about whether Ragtime is classical as much as it would be nonsense to quibble about whether D is in the set of {A,B,C}. They are all letters, and D has lots of qualities close to {A,B,C}, but it isn't in the set, maybe we could define the set {A,B,C,D} and say D is in that, but then we have a new set. Pick a new word and move on in life. Or you can co-opt the word "Classical" and add new things into the label, but that would be different than what we are talking about. Is Beethoven Classical or Romantic era? His early works are Classical, his later works become more and more Romantic and he is basically the father of the Romantic era, but we have to take a more nuanced view of everything he wrote. He isn't "just Romantic" but was influenced and influenced a whole host of ideas and areas. We can define attributes of a class and maybe we can say that anything that walks and quacks is a duck, but it is all simply splitting hairs and re-definitions. It is useful to have classes of things and distinctions of things that look alike, because then we can hope to reason about them, but ultimately we should look at Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic as separate things and understand them separately. In my view, one of the aims of a lot of classical music was to have highly structured music which could evoke a complex tapestry of emotion and ideals. It takes deeper understanding to get and appreciate a lot of art music ("music snobs"), but it was written for a _purpose_ and _ideal_, often ideological, religious, or emotional. Pop music is fun, lighthearted, easy to appreciate for most people and evokes feelings that we all know. But art music can be amplified by knowing the ideals and desires of those who wrote it. Beethoven's Eroica symphony has a complex background, symbolic and stylistic reasons for the way it is with the original desire to tribute Napoleon as a representative of Republican ideals (before he crowned himself Emperor... which made Beethoven erase that...). It is similar to appreciating why the Fairie Queene was written and appreciating the deeper symbolic meaning and cultural ideals, rather than reading the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew as pleasant detective fiction. That's my take on it.