Importance of Words to Music, a lyrical and melodic inquiry! Options

[trunks_girl26]

I resisted the urge to put this in Issues, even though it tends to be rather culturally relevant. Mods feel free to move this if they would like.

I just finished having a rather intense discussion with another forumite *cough*pwm*cough* which started as one about the limitations (or lack thereof) a choir has with music, as opposed to an orchestra and branched into one concerning the importance of words to music in general.

He tends to be of the opinion that words aren't as important as melody, while I feel that words can be as powerful, if not more, than the melody.

So, I put it to you, good Matazonians:

How important are words to music?
If words have no importance, would it be possible to take the same melody, put it to radically different phrases, and not not drastically change its meaning?
Does culture play a part in how important words are to music, if so how?

[PsychWardMike]

The simple fact that music without words exists and is equally - if not moreso - brilliant and beautiful than music with lyrics shows that words are secondary to music.

[Tarantio]

The simple fact that music without words exists and is equally - if not moreso - brilliant and beautiful than music with lyrics shows that words are secondary to music.

In an interesting twist to this, it can also be argued that songs (seperate to music in that they involve singing, and therefore lyrics) can, and have existed, and excelled, without music. The majority of hymns are sung without accompaniment, and indeed many of a bands best live performances are performed with little or no musical backing, "unplugged" so to speak.

I tend to see the two - music and singing - as two extremes of the same thing, rather than seperate entities. A lot of todays bands employ the difference in the two in their music, including long musical interludes in their songs, or songs that use lyrics as a form of music, or somesuch. In the case of pop songs, 99% of them don't rely on the lyrics as anything other than a catchy set of words to sing their tune to, but this isn't true of all music. Alternative and rock, as well as R+B, often have something to say with their songs, in which case the lyrics are completely the most important part of it. Singing a song in this way relies on the music to set the mood for the words, rather than the words giving substance to the beat of the music.

They're two extremes, I reckon, that you can see the difference between by listening to and comparing such artists as, for instance, the Chemical Brothers vs. the Manic Street Preachers, or Faithless against Modest Mouse. A couple of examples of the bands that have experimented with mixes of the two from my own collection are Bloc Party and Biffy Clyro, both of whom are reccomended listening.