(originally posted here∞)

I'm biased, but I consider music a more significant artform that lyricism. That doesn't mean lyrics can't enhance a piece of music, often greatly so, but great writing with crappy musical support is not going to create an enjoyable listening experience. (Note that I don't doubt its ability to make a great poetry reading, if you're into that.)

{Note from a musicologist: The privileging of music over words is a very common view which has been held by many philosophers and poets. Possibly beginning with German romanticism, and continuing with French symbolist poets, music was thought to provide access to metaphysical realms. Writers who held this view, such as Novalis and Wackenroder, believed that words should aspire to become as non-representational and ineffable as music.}

Even on the purely musical front, I'm still struggling to properly appreciate the art of voice -- the soloist in particular, since I've always loved good choral music. I remember reaching an epiphany that "this is real music" (both in terms of aesthetic merit and the challenges to the artist, not that those are independent) while listening to some fellow students practicing in Vienna, and subsequently when studying the historical development of the Western art-song. Yet I still go to operas silently yelling at the singers to finish up so we can get to the brass soli already.

On a side topic, however, Petruchio is exactly right. I have tracks of Russian techno, Bulgarian chant, and classical German lieder all of which I understand what they're saying better than many or most songs on the radio. Sometimes this crops up as simple misheard lyrics cf. the other thread, but even more often my brain is totally lost. It's a glaring enough phenomenon that I'm convinced I may be "speech deaf" (analogously to tone deaf people, of which I'm certainly not one).

With regard to JaxHasher, I do think it's fair to note the departure of several important hallmarks of good lyricism from pop and rock. I'm doubtful that country was its destination, but there's no question that pop/rock's remaining depth largely concerns unrequited love or angsty quasi-poetry, neither of which takes much skill as evidenced by the seeming authenticity of various Markov generators on the Net. Where have Goethe's pastoral verses gone? Ira Gershwin's clever word-plays? His ability to transcribe a then-new dialect into song? Not even to "progressive" rock as far as I can tell -- no, the true wordsmiths have taken hold in hip-hop. I don't even like the genre much, but have no qualms admitting the obvious here. (Some aspects, e.g. cleverness, can be found in niche subgenres like contemporary a cappella, which I not-coincidentally listen to.)


I hear what you're trying to say, but this is simply false. (Speaking for Western Europe...) up to the 15th centrury music was either commissioned by the Church, or played by peasant folk. Not much of the latter survives. Through the 18th century, you've got the same situation with the added venue of royal court salons; again only the "high" music (which could never be considered popular) survived. Around 1800 you have Schubert transforming the German folk-song into art-lieder palatable to high society -- some of the original folk material survives, but only the "classical" composers' take on it is still listened to (by non-musicologist) because it truly is superior: better treatment of register, increasingly complex harmonizations, more through-composed structures, etc. The situation is similar midway through the century when Dvorak tackles the folk music of Eastern Europe and North America, and a century later when Bartok does his thing.

Only with the rise of the educated middle class in the last quarter of the 19th century (perhaps the last half in Europe), and the accompanying cultural accoutrements like city orchestras, could you make an argument that today's classical music was ever popular. There are some possible examples, such as Verdi's prompting the return of the masses to the opera theater, but in general it's quite a stretch compared with more obvious candidates like the Appalachian ballad, the Negro spiritual, Gypsy klezmer, etc. The only music in this category that has even begun to enter the classical canon is Broadway theater, and even then one confines oneself to Gershwin, usually just Porgy at that.

The flip side to this treatment is that nobody knows what will be considered "classical" 100 years from now. I've heard compelling arguments from different musicologists that jazz is the new classical; that electronica is the new jazz; that the era of public appreciation for explicitly art-music has ended entirely and withdrawn to the high pillars of society, in this case the university. Who knows
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