Musicians shouldn't write their own lyrics
Why musicians should revive texts of the past
It wasn’t until the 19th century that a composer — the formidable Richard Wagner — had the courage to write his own libretti to his operas. Wagner also, by the way, commissioned special instruments to be used in his operas, notably the Wagner tuba. I like to think that for Wagner to write his own lyrics was at a comparable level of grandiosity to his commissioning special instruments. For Wagner, to write his own text wasn’t a mere fancy or a shrug of the shoulders, but a massive expression of his ambition. It wasn’t just about taking control of the textual side of his operas for his ego’s sake, but about using such control to create something way beyond himself, in pursuit of the mythical Gesamkunstwerk which stretches all the way to Ancient Greece (where Wagner believed the Gesamkunstwerk was almost achieved, but ended up flawed and malnourished) to the present moment of a highly nationalistic Germany. These days, writing your own lyrics is taken entirely for granted, and usually mumbled out of the mouths stream-of-consciousness style from every young guy or girl with a guitar at a DIY show.
Composers, for the longest time, knew their place. The masters of music — Bach, Beethoven, and so forth — would surmise from their own mastery of music that they were not masters of the text, and therefore should outsource to external texts and librettists that match their level of mastery in their respective art form. To bear such a mind for artistic excellence leads to a sort of humility especially when it comes to the composer’s relationship to other art forms they have not mastered. The magnum opus goes beyond the composer, into the synthesis of zeitgeist and eternity we call Tradition. In Beethoven’s case, by teaming up with Friedrich’s Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” the master composer and master writer were able to team up, creating something greater than either of them could do independently. In this case, it was to light a new candle of Tradition, which today we call Romanticism.
The consequences of musicians picking up their guitars and spilling out words is that, frankly, it mostly becomes about the singer’s feelings. Obviously this isn’t always the case, and an introspective song can be very compelling. And I’ve recorded four albums entirely with my own lyrics, so it’s fair to say that the provocative title of this essay is a jab at myself, an attempt at self-criticism. But it is common enough beyond my work to call the whole practice into question and offer an alternative. This essay isn’t going to delve into why our culture prioritizes Feelings over the Will, but it is important to remind the reader that is the case, and that it doesn’t need to be that way. Musicians’ “feelings” are notoriously messy anyways, and so it should be considered whether such things should be left to the unspoken, the purely musical. Feelings, broadly speaking, are enemies of Tradition. One must pick a side. Once upon a time, someone skipped Sunday Mass for the first time with no excuse or reason. Their lack of reason was likely uttered as follows: “I don’t feel like it.”
The alternative I offer is this: Tradition-minded musicians can use their musical abilities to illuminate texts past and present, including reviving ones long-forgotten, by integrating the texts into a composition or song, which through the music’s performance and artistry, offer either a unique interpretation of the text or simply mark a text as important and worth carrying through Tradition by the act of its performance as music.
One composer who pulled all the stops on this concept is British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Searching for tradition, he looked in the first place all should look, in his native country. For him, it was England, which during his lifetime was going through an identity crisis. Vaughan Williams wrote music to English masters such as Blake and Shakespeare, and in the 1950’s, towards the end of his life, he published a culmination of his life’s work, The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs. Here, Williams doesn’t compose but rather collects songs from humble folk singers who were being rapidly usurped by the newly invented pop record. The wandering folk singer is a compelling, aspirational archetype for the current moment because it is the antidote to the bedroom pop musician. In the 1969 film My Side Of The Mountain, twelve year-old Sam, who ran away from home to live self-sufficiently in the wilderness in aspiration of Henry David Thoreau, is visited at his camp by Bando, a humble traveler who “collects folk songs.” After Sam agrees that Bando can stay with him at camp, it is revealed that one who collects folk songs also collects other traditions as well, whether it’s the ability to make syrup out of tree bark, making pots from the clay by the pond, or just to bear the timeless humility, joy, and handiness that is so naturally passed down to a child like Sam, who in his own way is motivated by the American tradition as lit by those like Thoreau.
In the introduction to The Penguin Book, Vaughan Williams writes of how folk singers like Bando are going extinct because of commercial pop music, and this was all the back in the 1950’s, so you can imagine how this problem has grown:
“An old Suffolk labourer with a fine folk song repertory and a delicate, rather gnat-like voice, once remarked, ‘I used to be reckoned a good singer before these here tunes came in.’ The tunes he spoke of with such scorn had come in with a vengeance, and it seemed that his kind of songs, once so admired, would be lost under the flood of commercial popular music.”
“Tunes” is italicized by Vaughan Williams himself, which coats the word in the wise wit of rural scorn, as well as telling us that folk songs are more than just “tunes.” And that is the sad truth, that at the end of the day, the singer-songwriter or bedroom pop musician is doomed, by the precedents set for them by the historically-recent phonograph industry, to make mere “tunes.”
The only solution to escape the hegemony of tunes is for the musician / composer to widen their scope and vision. Vaughan Williams, despite his pastoral tendencies, actually saw filmmaking as the greatest expression of the Wagnerian Gesamkunstwerk.1 Opera is another option. But in both cases, these are expensive projects for the musician. Adapting a text such as a poem, a ballad, or even turning a novella into a radio musical, costs little to nothing (given it is public domain) and, in addition to giving the text new life, gives the composer a constraint. Instead of the usual tune-making habit of creating whatever music comes into their whimsical minds and putting words over it, when you start with words you have to fold the music around them. It is a totally different approach, and one that, as the history of both classical and folk music, creates a totally different form of music than the pop music that has dominated the post-war era.
Texts often have a kind of irregularity that is more tolerable than with music — as a result, music that is made around a text can have a greater variety of expressions. The natural musical tendency in the West is to make things square, in 4/4 time, with an ABAB structure, and neat harmony. But the written word, especially when in prose form, can have a river-like quality, rather than repeated blocks. In the recitatives of opera, or in the Evangelist’s reciting of the Gospel in J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion for example, composers can dip into the avant-garde (in the sense of exploring modernist concepts of stream-of-consciousness) without being self-indulgent, because they are serving the prose. And I believe composers for centuries have delighted in creating a music ambiance for texts, even if their music is subjugated to the background. Musicians by nature are servants, yet they are convinced by pernicious forces to be rock stars.
This last point bears repeating. The role of the musician, and the artist-at-large, is in desperate need of re-imagination in the contemporary world, and I’m totally a broken record when it comes to this topic. Recently I was following an obscure singer-songwriter on Instagram who, during the abhorrent “Spotify Wrapped” season (the dirge of musicality as we know it) of the turn of the year, expressed an elaborate disappointment over their lack of numbers (Spotify streams) and that “they were unable to reach an audience” despite a large of amount of time and effort spent. This kind of disappointment is taken for granted, but is merely of historical relevance and can only stem from the culture of the Solo Artist™. If instead of a solo singer-songwriter committed to doing everything themselves — music, lyrics, recording, mixing, marketing — it were a band of men who were in complete fraternity with each other and fully confident in what they were doing, they wouldn’t bat an eye at “stream numbers” and would be putting a middle finger up to the world no matter what happens. And furthermore, neither the composer of the Western classical tradition, nor Bando, nor the “Suffolk labourer” folk singer Vaughan Williams writes of are solo artists. For to be an Solo Artist™ you have to dismantle the role of the humble servant-musician as it exists for hundreds of years and replace it with a myth that has existed for fifty, that of the pop star or the rock star, and do so without realizing it.
Friends, never forget to learn from Johann Sebastian Bach. His St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion, unprecedented in scope and ambition at the time and still stunning today, were performed a mere four times each during Bach’s entire lifetime. To set the Passion of our Lord to music, to backlight the text, in service of his home church in Leipzeig, was enough for him, and ought to be enough for the contemporary musician as well.
"Film Music", The R. C. M. Magazine, February 1944.