Today, we consider "classical music" to be a form of art music distinct from popular music. In its own day, was it understood in this way, or was it considered a form of popular entertainment?

by Steel_Wool_Sponge

Other stuff I'm wondering in the same vein:

If there was a separate popular tradition contemporary with "classical" music:

--What are some surviving examples?

--What might a popular composer have thought about a Beethoven, a Brahms, etc.?

If there wasn't a separate tradition

How did most people get their music? Did you just go to a tavern, or...?

More generally:

When did we even begin to think about "classical" music as being classical?

What historical factors gave rise to this era of classical music relatively late in the game in terms of overall modern European history? (Say, if we roughly date "the Renaissance" in painting to the 1500s, with similar innovations in narrative arts happening around the same time, the era of "classical music" -- I think, idk really -- doesn't start until the 1700s or so, like two centuries later. Why?)

To answer your question about when “Classical” music being thought of as classical: It was during the Romantic era (for music, loosely starting around 1804, when Beethoven completed his third symphony, the Eroica, though musical Romanticism developed throughout the 19th century), but especially after Beethoven’s death (1827) that a sort of museum culture grew around music, and pieces began to be viewed as artifacts. The combination of veneration of Beethoven (one of the first composers to be viewed with the mystique we now associate with artists) and a renewed interest in music of the past, assisted by Felix Mendelssohn’s revival of J.S. Bach’s music (Robert Schumann, a friend and contemporary of Mendelssohn’s and a music critic in addition to a composer, was also very interested in J.S. Bach) in the late 1820s and 1830s certainly contributed to the (retrospective, at first) creation of a musical canon.

“What historical factors gave rise to this era of classical music relatively late in the game in terms of overall modern European history?”

The development of High Viennese Classicisim (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) roughly corresponded with the Classical movements in both painting and literature (and the later Enlightenment period, generally). During the Renaissance, music experienced a similar revolution to writing with the invention of the printing press (the first printed music being the Odhecaton in 1501, a collection printed by Ottaviano de Petrucci), and alongside painting and literature and human thought and culture generally, music underwent massive changes from 1500 to the mid 1700s, when we start to see composers that are now household names. Improvements in printing (particularly lithography) allowed music to be more easily distributed in the mid-1700s, the focus on learning and education in the Enlightenment, which led to a larger number of treatises and method for playing instruments, improvements in instrument construction itself, the rise in the number of amateur players, and a lighter style of music (compared to the theoretically complex and technically difficult music of the Baroque), all interacted (both effecting and being effected by each other) to bring about the music we consider to be “Classical” today.

[As an aside, if you’re interested in the music of the Renaissance, check out Guillaume Dufay, John Dunstable (early Renaissance); John Taverner, Thomas Talis, Josquin du Pres (early-mid 1500s); William Byrd, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, John Dowland (High Renaissance). And then there are the Baroque era composers, including Monteverdi, Purcell, Lully, Buxtehude, Corelli, Vivaldi, JS Bach, Handel, Telemann, Couperin (the last two of whom really began to transition into the Rococo style), before we get to Haydn, who was born in 1732.] This list of composers is by no means exhaustive, and it’s important to keep in mind that labels and divisions of eras are all applied later, by scholars looking back