Yes! I agree. I also hate the term “classical music” I think It fits with the music from 17th to 19th century in my opinion. Also, it only fits with the Western European music. For example, when you want to call “The Rite of Spring” classical music, you will soon see it feels weird. I think to coin a new term, you need to look into the old term carefully. As mentioned, a certain periodic situation comes up from the term, which can not be suitable for the Stravinsky’s music. Likewise, nobody wants to call the traditional Korean music classical music either. Then, what else we could get from it? I think it is the nature of the music. “classical” could mean well-organized, serious, not that popular, not vulgar, not mediocre, and etc…..Therefor, we need to find or create new term which can express those characteristics, but it has to be disconnected with the specific time period and area. In fact, unintentionally several alternatives were suggested already. For example, “Contemporary Music” is the one. But, this cannot point the profound nature of the music, because, for example, almost every pop musicians likes to use that term for their genre. It can only cover relatively recent music, but the term is being liked very much by the composer who are composing serious and radical new music like Milton Babbitt, Isang Yun, Lukas Foss, and many others like them or agreeing with them in some artistic philosophy including me. (The following is my personal webpage.) (http://holofa5180.wix.com/gon-hwang) Sometimes, I saw “serious music” as the alternative, but which is not fully depicting the fundamental nature of the music. Sometimes, I saw a term “contemporary classical music” which is very ironic but persuasive in the fact that it is describing the nature of it to some degree in its own way.

So, therefore, I think it looks almost impossible to create a new one. But, what about “Artistic Music”? if possible. For example, we can call Beethoven’s music artistic music, and also call Stravinsky, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, and even Josquin des Prez. Of course, it does not sound like a term fully set, but the more we could call it, the more firmly it will be set.

You might say that what about Jazz?. Of course we can name it artistic music and cannot call it classical music. In fact, the fundamental nature of the so-called classical music had been enlarged already around the beginning period of the 20th century. In other words, there is notional space that we call jazz “new type of classical music” after that period. Of course, there are tunes which cannot be considered as artistic music, but in the classical repertoire, we could have the same situation.

Now, It feels like I just want to hear more alternatives from you. That’s it!

P.S

As for the term “composed music”, there are many so called modern classical music which were not composed fully or partly such as Lukas Foss, John Cage, and etc. Even, the tradition of “Basso Continuo” is improvisational even though it comes up from the music like Bach for example.