When Dave Finley and I started The Classical Source in May 1999 the intention was simply to be the source of all classical music to be found on the web, hence the capital T. As time progressed the real question of what classical music really is came to be as much an issue for us as it had been for the music industry during the 1990s.

Luciano Pavarotti, though by no means the first such artist to try, can largely take the credit (or, depending on your point of view, the blame) for renewed enthusiasm in classical music. The signature-tune for the 1990 World Cup, held in Italy – ‘Nessun dorma’ (from Puccini’s Turandot) lest we forget – together with the first of The Three Tenors concerts, held on the night of the football Final, showed how classical music could be developed beyond its traditional, some may say elitist, roots.

1992 gave the BBC a wake-up call with the launch of the first national radio station outside of its remit – and Classic FM was a classical music station to boot. Within six months of its launch the broadcaster had over four million listeners each week; it now has 50 percent more than that including 400,000 children – so, clearly, classical music has an enthusiastic following. But should a single movement taken from symphonies and concertos be an issue? Generally, composers wrote their music to be listened to as an entity, but there are ample accounts of music being performed piecemeal during a concert; sometimes an individual movement from a bigger piece was all that was played – so this ‘change’ in the way of listening was not new.

Eager for a slice of public interest, ‘crossover’ became the word of the day. Cries of ‘dumbing down’ were heard – as they had been in the early 1970s when Stephane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin started their collaboration, except this time a middle-ground seemed to be forming – some classical performers were moving to more-popular genres. This middle-ground also attracted artists from the ‘pop’ world, such as Rod Stewart and his four albums of The Great American Songbook (2002-2005) on which he sings standards from the 1930s and 1940s.

In 2007 I reviewed the Last Night of the Proms festivities in Hyde Park, London. Appearing there were Lesley Garrett and Mark Simpson (BBC Young Musician of the Year, 2006) together with Spandau Ballet front-man Tony Hadley and the winner of the 2005 X-Factor, Chico. The most recent Classical BRIT awards (in May) acknowledged, amongst others classical musicians, Sir Colin Davis, Anna Netrebko and Steven Isserlis – yet included live performances by American singer-songwriter Josh Groban and Jonathan Ansell, both from G4 and much better known for their crossover activities.

Modern recording techniques have allowed the proliferation and diversification of musical styles to a greater extent than ever before. The Internet has allowed anyone with an idea to develop and share it. Music today is a polymath, its creators drawing upon a wide variety of styles and cultures. Is it now possible to define classical music? Probably not.

Returning to our original intention of becoming the source of all classical music, nearly ten years on and being unable to truly define what we are attempting to be the source of, it now seems particularly important to embrace the widest definition of the genre – even though a part of me feels that it is not as good as it was in my day.