Term used generically to refer to any “serious” Western art music, that is, music whose traditions are traceable, from the various 20th-century styles to Romantic, Classical, Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval music; also used ahistorically and relatively as a comparison with Romantic music to denote a style which emphasizes formal beauty rather than freedom of personal expression, intellect rather than raw emotion.Music conforming to an established form and appealing to critical interest and developed musical taste; SYN. serious music.
Term used specifically to refer to the period between approximately 1750 and 1820, in which composers' concerns for form and symmetry were analogous to those of the ideals of Classical Greek and Roman art and philosophy. As epitomized by the Viennese Classical School of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Classical music is characterized by the growth of clear formal and sectional elements, especially sonata form; clear and often symmetrical harmonic and melodic relationships from phrase to phrase and section to section, influenced in part by the study of rhetoric (for example, the use of antecedent / consequent phrases); and the development from Baroque polyphony and counterpoint to the melodic style of homophony with distinct and subordinate accompaniments.