Thanks for your question. I can think of a couple ways ofanswering your question, we'll see if you think any of them areworthwhile. It is often said in evolutionary accounts of human beings thatmusic is a universal feature, because it served or still serves somesurvival function. If one could indeed map the 'need' for musicagainst an evolved feature of the human brain, then that would provemusic is not merely cultural (and thus whether there is music in aparticular culture would be contingent). However, to evaluate thisevolutionary account empirically, presumably one would have torigorously define music, and distinguish it from language, poetry,noises, imitation, etc. And arriving at such a definition doesn'tseem easy for precisely the reasons you raise. Similarly, it is often pointed out thatcultures in cold climates have many words for snow, while culturesfrom tropical climes have few or none. Many words are needed in theformer case to indicate differences that culture finds...

A similar question has already been asked. Have a look at: http://www.askphilosophers.org/question/729 It seems to me that 'music' and 'noise' are being used in twodifferent senses here. First, an 'objective' sense, as types ofthings whose properties can be enumerated. Second, as values: 'I likethis', 'this is important', 'this is what music should be' and soforth. Here as in so many cases, distinguishing these senses andkeeping them separate is very difficult, perhaps impossible. It may be possible to give a fully objective description of sometypes of noise (e.g. 'white noise') but otherwise the term is appliedin a value-laden fashion: what is noise to one person is joyfullyraucous to another; even to the same person at a different time.Moreover, music is not a thing, it is a cultural production and a culturalreception, and any definition will have to rely upon cultural normsand histories. So, a piece of contemporary music that appears asnoise at first may 'resolve' itself into something...

Aesthetic appreciation means well-informed, skilled and close attention to a work of art, all of which can be improved by various types of education. It may be that philosophers of aesthetics tend to not use the word 'appreciation', but the constituent ideas are certainly important. Have a look at previous answers on this site under the heading of 'art': quite a few of them concern context, culture or knowledge.

I'm not convinced that European music ever had the clear periodisation that you describe. 'Baroque', 'Classical' and so forth tend to be descriptions applied by historians of music after the fact. In fact, at any one time, there were thousands of composers, working to specialised markets, with different players (large, small, amateur, professional, private, or public) and publishers in mind, with regional styles, and so forth. It may well be that the music scene you describe will, a generation from now, be seen as much more simple and homogeneous than it now appears. History naturally simplifies music just as it naturally simplifies philosophy. Is there more variety now, do genres ‘fragment’ more quickly? Probably, but this may be only a matter of degree, rather than an essential change. Nor am I convinced by the argument that the pursuit of a public, or the employment of new technology, are new phenomena. There were, and still are, ‘artists’ more concerned with making music than with having...