Is Popular Music Really Classical Music?

If I started a discussion on what really is classical music, I might be viewed as an Existentialist, perhaps even a Nihilist, but would I be correct or incorrect in the matter?

If I said that 200,000 years ago people were singing songs to each other from trees, while mumbling words to each other at the same time; most people would probably not disagree with me. If I then went on to say that in order for something to be "Classical" (enduring), it would have had to been on our earth for a very long time, most wouldn't disagree with me either. Well, then true poetry and classical music are really what most people would refer to today as "Popular Music." "Popular Music," has very little form and structure, so does the poetry associated with "Popular Music"; the songs people sung on trees 200,000 years ago is very much akin to what we today refer to as "Popular Music." So "Popular Music" today should really be called: "Classical Music."

Even 2000 years ago, philosophers and thinkers debated what true art was. I'm going to attempt to leave literature out of the equation and try to only focus on music. I'll say this though: today, what most people refer to as: "Classical Music"; is really most akin to what most people refer to today as "Great Literature." Aestheticians from the Greek and Roman periods studied the topic of true art vs. natural beauty to a great extend. Oscar Wilde was obsessed with the concept of art vs. true natural beauty as well, making him one the great authorities on the subject of aesthetics. Wilde felt that both art and music were just too unnaturally complicated; and complicated is what bests describes serious music; which is the music of the great masters.

Concertos, symphonies, and sonatas all possess something known as "Sonata Allegro Form." The "Sonata Allegro Form" is only 500 years old. It's very structured and complicated; very new in contrast to songs which were sung by our ancestors 200,000 years ago. The reason the "Sonata Allegro Form" is only 500 years old, is because music was very underdeveloped before then. Key-modulations were difficult for many musical instruments. Of course, if you take into account some symphonies by composers such as Mahler or Shostakovich, their works are the complicated equivalent to something like Tolstoy's "War and Peace," or Proust's "A La Recherché" in literature...all structured, unnatural, and extremely complicated.

So if anything, most people will think twice from now on when they hear the term: "Classical Music" being thrown around.

Although in semantics: "Classical Music" is the music from the mid 18th to the late 18th century only.