Ron,

Yes I'm aware of the faults of some DG records, I have over 100 DG LPs (but bought only a few new). As for their CDs I glance at the yellow section of the shelf across the room and there's just 12 - a few are Bohm or Karajan reissues but the others are digital. And, yes, I look at Decca 1960s as the best records in my collection and early stereo HMVs too, not a great fan of Philips or RCA, and I don't think I have anything on the Mercury label.

The CFM evening concerts are OK if I'm listeneing in here with the computer humming and possibly noise from the TV next door and the rumble of a washing machine or drier in the kitchen   (I'm not a frequent wearer of headphones). Hmmm, CFM are doing too many ads this evening

Classical music is not a genre. This is a strange lie put about by iTunes (inter alia).

Sonata, symphony, concerto, song, and (arguably) 12-bar blues are genres.

Yes. If it's anything, I think it must be a style. (Same goes for jazz - not a genre.)

I did think about that, R. I think that would also be a good one.

The real difficulty, of course, stems from the fact that 'classical vs. [insert other kind of] music' is not a hard and fast distinction the way sonata vs. symphony or song vs. instrumental is. Any term we do use is an attempt, whether for reasons of ideology or convenience, to fix what should be unfixed. That's fine, but it strikes me as regrettable that the convenience (and, in part, the ideology) of the iTunes mode of listening should have so strongly permeated people's ideas about what 'classical music' is or means.

I was trying to avoid that, because it appears not to allow for genres that cross the classical/pop 'divide', e.g. song ('Yesterday' is the same genre as Schubert's 'Ständchen', whatever the stylistic differences).

Eh?!
I would say that it's a fairly stonking proportion of art music (whatever we mean by that) even after 1600 (arbitrary marker), but before that point it's HUGE!

This is the problem with taxonomies when it comes to something like music!
Operas obviously include songs, as well as things which are like songs but are probably a different genus except that there's sort of a continuum [sigh].
But what I meant was that there is a substantial body of secular music, a lot of which doesn't survive, pre 1600 that made up the bulk of the repertoire and were called songs (indeed much instrumental music is merely the transcription of songs - it could possibly be said, if one was feeling particularly foolhardy, that the song forms the foundation of secular music for a substantial length of the history of music). Of course it's arguable whether this is 'classical' music. What is 'classical' music and how should we define it? Actually what is music?

The danger of using R3 as a sample is that the proportion of music played from outside of a narrow historical period is quite slim, which understandably skews the perspective. Also, since song is one of those genres that garners great surges of criticism from the R3 audience (if the MBs are anything to go by), lieder etc. tend to be 'contained' in hermetically sealed slots. And as for the Proms... It's not a suitable venue for the majority of songs with piano accompaniment.

I'm just waffling away here but taxonomies are only as useful as the uses to which they are put. Are we aiming to educate by proposing new taxonomies, to make it easier to locate some musics, to shape the future of music being produced?
Pigeon holes are for pigeons? 'Any classification is better than chaos'? (Levi-Strauss)