The main use for classical music these days seems to be to drive the homeless out of the Port Authority bus terminal.
As for Doug's alleged philistinism, in the midst of the recent Burns/Jazz hype, I recently wondered out whether one could find anyone who is not a misanthrope, hopelessly backward or a musical illiterate to take the negative in the debate "Resolved: jazz is America's classical music." The New Criterion's Samuel Lippman might have done the job before he kicked the bucket a while back, in the past decade or so Terry Teachout seems to have won the neo-cons over to jazz. Of course, the pwog-left has long since given up on classical music as it is just ever so terribly elitist.
On the other hand, I quite agree with Doug that Madonna (or the conglomerate who manufactures the songs which she-with the help of terabytes of of signal processing software-manages to croak out onto a hard-drive) is probably a better "composer" than Charlie Parker.
M's "compositions" are more tightly constructed, have more formal variety (not much, but Parker's have virtually none), have more interesting basslines-both rhythmically and melodically, occassionally have an asymettrical phrase structure-if I remember correctly, (anyone know of a five-measure phrase in a Parker improvisation?) etc.
John