Art Music and the conundrum that is Classical Music.
Classical music, as a term, was originally coined to describe a certain way of writing music and the classical era was roughly 1750 to 1820. Beethoven was born into the classical tradition and broke away from it and was a pioneer of the Romantic era, roughly 1820 - 1900. Then along comes the Twentieth Century and people get lazy and call anything that involves "serious" music written for a symphony orchestra or similar, Classical Music.
An alternative term is Twentieth Century Music, but this lacks imagination except in the minds of people for whom the Twentieth Century was somehow special and believed that humans had reached some kind of pinnacle and all that was left to do was to establish some kind of master race. Anyway, as history always does, it smashes your illusions and now it's the Twenty First Century. Does that mean an automatic genre change?
So, Twenty First Century Music as a term won't solve the problem either. The thing about the perpetuation of the term Classical Music in the Twentieth Century is that it generalised the idea of music with a highly structured methodology, that required some level of academic involvement to properly appreciate. Terms like Romanticism and Impressionism and Serialism refer to fairly particular ways of approaching music with their own distinct sound and yet all three genres involved similar levels of discipline. So, I can see that Classicism, which could almost be seen as more about the discipline than the end result, probably seemed to be the best candidate to use in general.
Anyway, an attempt has been made to end the confusion caused by the use of the term Classical Music. And it's not just the confusion, but the just plain inappropriateness of the term, even if it had been coined anew. The general use of the term Classical in any field contradicts the use of the word new. So, let's call it Art Music - the new term that is being used in the field of "serious" music and has been for a while. I'm not sure I like it, but I think it's significantly better than what it's replacing.
I get the intent. Art has always been art, regardless of the era. Many terms have been used to describe the evolution of art through history, but it's never got stuck with a term like Classical as it's been used to describe music. Throw in the complication of the explosion of the Pop Music phenomenon in the Twentieth Century and serious composers begin to feel the need to distinguish themselves.
You can't fill a stadium with people to watch somebody paint, but you can fill a stadium to watch somebody strutting their stuff with three chords and a beat, that for some would be like watching paint dry. So, I guess serious artists have felt less threatened than serious composers.
This insecurity in the music world persists. Some serious music people don't want Pop Music included under the Art Music umbrella. So, it's still an exclusive term and not an all encompassing term like Art. But then, if we all truly got over ourselves, we'd just call it Music. Right? But, can we at least agree that we should stop using the term Classical Music, except for music written roughly between 1750 and 1820?
And Pop Music, there's a genre bending phenomenon. That's a whole other rabbit hole for later.