What’s
The Impact Of Lyrics On Music?
- Does a song needs meaningful lyrics? –
The painter needs colours and shapes, the author needs words and
sentences, and the musician needs rhythms, tones, sounds and voices.
These are basically the main differences of the three art forms.
Words and text are in principle not required components to paint or
make music. It’s enough to have a title or name for paintings and
music pieces.
Music is a language of itself. This is obvious for instrumental
music like concerts, symphonies, organ, piano, etc. Rhythms, tones,
melodies, sounds and voices mediate mood and feeling without singing
meaningful lyrics. Therefore many international songs and hits for
example are successful not because of exciting and meaningful lyrics,
but due to the unique musical compositions and the specific sonic
characters of the singing voices in accordance with the moods, minds
and tastes of the mass of listeners.
But the human voice is an individually different musical
“instrument” to be used as an outstanding stylistic device as part
of a song, a musical, opera or other music pieces. It needs sounds
in such a way of vowels, consonants and resonant syllables to get a
voice musical audible. Songwriters and rap vocalists apply words and
text of known languages which fit to the chosen rhythm and sound.
To express a voice musical effectively, it’s not necessary to use a
native language like English, French, Italian, German, etc., an
artificial, freestyle fantasy language can be applied as well as
part of a music piece.
Folksongs, hits, musicals and operas utilize traditionally
meaningful lyrics for singing and recitative. Many foreign-language
lyrics may not be readily understood always and completely by the
mass of listeners. It’s not essential to understand the used
language to know the true promise of the musical piece.
Naturally it’s easier to sing in a native language than creating an
adequate and tuneful fantasy language. However there are the
possibilities to imitate a native language and hybrid forms of
tongues. The imitation of a native language has to take care of the
characteristic phonetic attributes of the selected native language.
Well known are for example the nasal sounds of the French language.
Who is using an imitation of a native language or fantasy words for
lyrics is able to compose a song with vocal arrangement like a
traditional songwriter.
But there are still only a few vocal songs published using an
artificial or fantasy language. Similar to the poetic licence of
literature, the music maker can create new phonetic acoustic and
language-like lyrics to use the human voice as pure art form for
music.
Is there anything to be said against or in addition?
Volker Zdunnek aka Philos60 |