Is Music Poetry?

I'm a classically trained musician. In fact, I'm finishing this post in a hotel at a state band event (hope you all had fun in school). Considering my background in music, I found myself hesitant to defend music as poetry for last week's assignment for two reasons. First, 90% of what I listen to is wordless clarinet music which didn't leave me with a ton of material. Second, I think extracting the lyrics from a song neglects a large part of what contributes to its meaning.

I see music and poetry as different art forms. Like all art forms, they are means of expression and a way to communicate experience. However, they are also fundamentally different. While poems stand alone on paper, the lyrics of a song accompany specific music. Songwriters/musicians intentionally write this music to complement the lyrics (or vice versa) and to contribute to their meaning. I think, therefore, that analyzing a song's meaning without addressing musical elements like instrumentation, chord structure, major/minor key, etc. will not result in a thorough understanding.

The song I chose for last week's assignment was "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" by Arcade Fire. Their lyrics are always very thoughtful so the assignment wasn't too difficult. I found it hard, however, to completely ignore musical parts of the song when discussing it's meaning: the way the whimsical piano arpeggios at the beginning mimic the snowfall that the song describes; how the piano shifts to chords and the instrumentation builds as the speaker in the song grows up, but returns to light arpeggios at the end; the way that Win Butler sings emotionally, not necessarily beautifully, almost shouting at parts. All these elements and several more build the song's nostalgic mood and enhance the meaning of lyrics. I feel that setting "Tunnels" to other music or reading it without its musical accompaniment would change the whole experience of listening to it and could alter its meaning.

Essentially I want to say that I don't think it's right to defend music as poetry. Many song lyrics do fulfill Perrine's descriptors for poetry in the sense that they are a condensed form of literature. Sometimes song lyrics can stand as poems alone (e.g. our national anthem, which would probably kill the mood of our music poetry playlist but in hindsight would have been a funny choice). So yes, song lyrics can be poetic. And poetry, spoken word in particular, can have elements of music. That said, much of the rest of Perrine definition (communicating experience) applies to several art forms. Art forms can overlap, but they all have unique characteristics. Thus, while they can share elements, music and poetry are not the same thing. I think last week's assignment was really to look for elements of poetry in song lyrics rather than to defend the entire song as poetry, which would be impossible.