Certif1ed

I've been to college, got degrees and stuff in music yadda yadda...

Everyone in academia is aware that "Classical" strictly refers to a short period between 1750 and 1820, but everyone with very few exceptions uses "classical" as an umbrella term to describe non-folk acoustic music.

Folk music is deemed to be traditional music, passed down from generation to generation, and performed by non academically educated people. That's a huge generalisation, as classically educated musicians often enjoy performing folk music (but never seem to get it quite right for one reason or another!).

Composers have long plundered the huge reserves of folk music for inspiration to their works. They did not think in terms of genres when they wrote the music, they just wrote what would go down well with their audiences, until the Romantics came along and decided that audiences should jolly well like whatever they wrote because it's art.

Just about every musical "movement" is misleading. It's rarely a movement of people getting together and saying "Hey, dudes, let's get Baroque on everyone's ass", it's just composers wanting to get paid for their work, and jumping on bandwagons of new, popular writing styles, and someone comes along years later and says "Hey, those dudes were like really Baroque in style" and their buddies go "Yeah, dude".

Some things never change...