"Classical Music"

What is "classical music"? In the historical sense, it is music written in the Classical era by contemporaries of Mozart, Haydn, etc. This is "Classical" with a capital C.

However, this phrase is often used casually to mean something more ambiguous. The current edition of the American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy says it's "a loose expression for European and American music of the more serious kind, as opposed to popular or folk music."

The term in that sense is problematic. Both implications—that European/American popular/folk music isn't serious and that non-popular and non-folk music is serious—are questionable because there seem to be many exceptions. This is one general objection to all such distinctions between so-called "high" and "low" art. Of course, even if one buys the idea that there are two kinds of music, "classical music" is still a little confusing because it sometimes carries the former meaning. ("Is this piece classical or Classical? Is it classically written?")

There are alternatives. One can refer to the composer, the band or artist; describe the instrumentation; make an individual judgement on the "seriousness" of the work without lumping it with other similarly "serious" works; or use other genre-specific vocabulary.