Posted under Music Quotations
“Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.” - Plato
Lol - I wonder what Plato would make of today’s pop charts! Somehow I don’t think most modern songs are too concerned about creating virtous souls in their listeners. Still, I like the idea that music itself has a positive, enobling effect. I find that many songs have music that is very uplifting, but lyrics that are the opposite. I often think how nice it would be if they were sung in some other language that I couldn’t understand!
But generally, as a listener, I don’t pay much attention to song lyrics. And even though as a songwriter, I write both the music and the lyrics for my own songs, I still think of lyrics as a bit of a necessary evil (well maybe that’s a little extreme, as I enjoy writing lyrics too, and do think they’re important, but not as much as the music), and ultimately dispensible, as nearly all of my songs also work equally well as instrumentals. Although I’m not too concerned with ‘virtue’, I am concerned with enjoying my life, and when it comes to enjoying writing and listening to music, for me it’s always the music that’s the main focus, not the lyrics - and good music can usually compensate for banal or even downright off-putting lyrics, in many cases.
