The natural links between music and lyrics
Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein once gave a conference to explain how music and language are related. He chose to present Chomsky’s point of view, comparing the grammar of music and the grammar of language. Furthermore, numerous researchers in the field of music psychology have written theses explaining the nature of the relationships between music and language in its various anthropological, social and psychological aspects.
The fact is that speech has a certain musicality and that animals, who do not speak or sing exactly as humans do, produce sounds that are musical. All the studies made in the field of human sciences are at the cross-roads of linguistics, musicology, and evolutionary psychology. They tend to prove that music had to evolve with humanity, as a fundamental process, because it was so close to language from the beginning of humanity.
Generally, these ideas are welcome amongst all the clans of the music industry: they are eminently cultural, they promote a global love for music as a universal art as well as an interest for local embodiments of music: it is especially true for all varieties of the music genre named ‘world music’, which covers a great number of all music styles from all times and places. So, music and language or music and lyrics are intrinsically associated.
Can music be seen as separate from lyrics?
In popular music, is it virtually impossible, when there are lyrics, to separate them from music. They catch the attention of the listener as much as music itself. It raises problems sometimes, when lyrics are judged non-ethical, for example when they talk about human relationships in a way that is considered as inappropriate for children and teenagers. Educators and parents may react strongly, with varying degrees of success. Alas that situation is fairly common.
Now there are more surprising cases where lyrics may interfere with the nature of musical practice. For instance, in 2015, a musical album written by a music composer producing salsa songs was excluded from a competition organized around latin music because it contained too many songs whose lyrics were in English. None of the musical elements composing that musical ‘sauce’ (which is the meaning of ‘salsa’) were taken into account. Decision makers only saw that most of the presented songs did not have lyrics in Spanish or Portuguese. Of course, each organizing committee has the right to make its own rules, however the case is significant and shows that the quality of music is too often neglected in favour of cultural criteria.
And for listeners, it means that they may ignore the existence of original productions just because of lyrics. Can popular music keep the right to express itself and invite listeners to feel and think independently of the lyrics? As lyrics induce feelings and emotions, it seems that it depends on the music and the listeners, however it is still worthwhile drawing attention to the question.