Random thoughts about music

I highly recommend that guy's YT channel, by the way. Adam Neely, jazz bassist and composer, but also a very interesting music theory YouTuber.

First, a disclaimer: I don't pay attention to lyrics. Or at least, it's very rare that I do. I grew up listening essentially to anglophone music, and I couldn't understand a word at first and I guess it became a habit of mine to just ignore them. But even now that I'd theoretically be able to understand most of what I listen to, most of the time I couldn't even tell you what a given song is about. To me, music is first and foremost about... music. I get the other side of the argument, but yeah, that's how it works for me.

Another reason is that I'm very picky about lyrics. If you asked me to name really good lyricists, the list would be very short. And entirely consisting of French-speaking people (the addition of "-speaking" is exclusively due to Brel actually) who are either dead or not very young, with maybe a handful of exceptions. Benjamin Biolay comes to mind, but he's not exactly a youngster either.

So I don't have an informed opinion on the interplay between the meter of the lyrics and of the music, or even on the meter of lyrics in general. Still, I'd say that at least in popular music, the correspondence would tend to be flexible, since you can always fit more syllables than there are notes to sing, or make a syllable longer.


I think most of the time it's a matter of taste, as there's no substantial difference between the two. 3/8 is supposed to be used for more fast-paced songs, but that's subjective, and I don't think anyone could take issue with a 3/8 song being transcribed in 3/4 or the reverse.

One of my criteria for good lyrics is that I would find them really good even in writing. For instance, I really like the lyrics of a ton of rappers, but reading their texts would be a bit boring, with a few exceptions.

None of the above hymns are among my favorites, though the closest would be "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah/Redeemer*", which is set to a nice uplifting tune with the sort of steady, marching rhythm that makes it rather fun to sing.

I don't feel strongly about the other two; I find the first rather forgettable. "It is Well with my Soul" is quite famous, and I don't dislike singing it, but it doesn't do all that much for me. Though I'm a bit surprised by your reaction. I would've expected the Stoic-like sentiment to appeal to a Classicist.

I tend to like hymns in a triple meter with a strong melodic profile. Here are three of my favorites.

1) "All Creatures of our God and King"/"Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones" (they use the same tune, and I love both sets of lyrics):



2) "Come Sing, O Choirs Exultant": probably fairly unknown. Here's a not-great recording of it (unfortunately no better exists):



Here's a much clearer recording of the same tune with different words:



3) "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" (The tune is Hyfrydol, also used for a number of other lyrics):

(If the long organ prelude bores you, just skip to 0:31.)


*I've seen both variants. Personally I prefer "Jehovah", which has an exciting OT ring to it. In comparison, "Redeemer" seems a bit bland.

I feel sure that I've heard the first one fairly often; I'm hardly a churchgoer, but you hear an awful amount of mainly Anglican services one way or another. The second I'm fairly sure I've never heard; with the third I can't be sure.

The funeral service was rather comic. The priest was reading and controlling the music from a tablet, and for whatever reason the music for the second hymn wouldn't play. So we had to sing the second one a capella, and I do mean we had to, because there weren't more than a dozen of us at most. To paraphrase Florence Foster Jenkins, they might say that we couldn't sing, but they couldn't say that we didn't sing. You could tell the priest was more comfortable with it, although he didn't have much of a singing voice either.

Why do we make and listen to music?

Wikipedia's article on music has that:



I'm not familiar at all with the literature at all, but none of those theories feels completely satisfying to me. The sexual selection theory doesn't work for me because you'd expect say a heterosexual man to only respond favorably to female singers and vice-versa, which is clearly not the case even when their voices are clearly recognizable as male or female. A counter-argument could be that if we evolved an attraction for singing from the opposite sex, maybe this generalized into an attraction for singing, period, but then you'd still have to explain our interest in purely instrumental music.

You could again go for a generalization and say that our original attraction for good singers of the opposite sex led us to appreciate certain arrangements of pitches and rhythms. Maybe, but the gap between appreciating a good singer thereby supposedly showing their mating fitness and say, a drum solo, is a huge one to bridge IMO.

Individual tastes aside, I feel like music is ultimately more about rhythm than pitches/melody. A drum solo is undoubtedly music, but a succession of pitches with no "coherent" rhythm hardly classifies as music. That may be too broad a statement, and music styles exist where the concept of a bar or a beat doesn't come much into play. Still, the temporal organization of sounds seems to be a much more defining feature of music than the use of pitches.

The importance of rhythm makes me lean more toward the labor organization and community cohesion theories, and they can help making a connection between say a bunch of workers singing during harvest, and a guy hitting a drum for others to march to in the military. Still, I feel like it falls short of giving a satisfying explanation to the common urge to move one's body to music. No doubt that there were some tasks where a group being able to synchronize their movements would have been very useful, but is it useful enough, and something that we would have had to do often enough that evolution would have selected for this ability so strongly?

Maybe, but I'm still tempted to ask: why on earth would evolution want us to move our bodies to a given rhythm? What type of movement could that be? An obvious kind of move whose timely execution evolution would be likely to select for would be running from danger, but you'd rather run as fast as you can in such situations, not run to the beat of your favorite song. Unless you lived in a jungle where natural hurdles (fallen trees, anthills, thick bushes, etc.) happened to be equally spaced. But other than preparing you to be a good hurdling athlete, I don't really see the benefits of that since natural hurdles aren't like that.
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Maybe developing a good sense of rhythm gives you better reflexes, anticipation of temporal events, movement coordination. Music then would be a kind of play, in the sense of mammalian play or play-fighting.

I can understand gastronomy: we evolved to derive pleasure from eating, because eating allows you not to die. It also makes sense that we have a particular liking for fats and sugar since they're good sources of calories, and it's at least understandable that this craving was sublimated into gastronomy. But if gastronomy is the sublimation of our urge for food that would (theoretically) lead to better health, what is music the sublimation of?

This thread is called "Random thoughts about music". I paid particular attention to the random part of it, and am not pretending that this forms a coherent whole. Do feel free to share your theories about the origins of music!