SONGLINES

posted by James Reel

    I really should visit the American Music Center’s NewMusicBox more often, not just when I find a link elsewhere. Here’s editor Frank Oteri grousing about a subject dear to my heart:

    Once upon a time, songs referred exclusively to single-movement musical compositions involving a singer or singers. They typically employed sung language which was more poetic than narrative, and most required a relatively short duration (typically three minutes). When composers of instrumental music wanted to make reference to song-like qualities in other types of compositions—such as short, lyrical, solo piano pieces—they woulcall them "songs without words," as Mendelssohn once famously did. …
    But now everything is a song in popular parlance, whether it has words or not and no matter how long it is. As a result, the song paradigm—which still assumes a normative status of vocal, short, and in one movement—determines how all music is listened to. When's the last time an "instrumental" got on the Billboard charts? The song paradigm also frequently proscribes how music gets parsed out in digital databases. In a world where sound files are downloaded individually rather than bunched together onto recordings, these databases threaten to become our prime distribution model. Although some headway has been made with classical music in the age of the iPod, there are still appications where the only fields open to music files are artist and song title. This is a total mess if your "song" happens to be called Symphony No. 7 plus it is in four movements and therefore requires more than one sound file.
    By calling everything a song, we've also paralyzed our ability to make musical distinctions. How can you make sense of a musical landscape where a continuous 45-minute sitar improvisation, a Roger Sessions concerto, and a rap by Chuck D are all called songs?

    You can read the whole thing here. Frank is complaining about a specific instance of a larger problem: Americans’ insensitivity to the useful distinctions between words. English, with its huge vocabulary, is a language both colorful and precise, but too many people fail to use the right word at the right time. If you look at Frank’s article and scroll down through the comments section, you’ll find one respondent saying, “I could care less what someone calls a piece of mine.” Actually, he couldn’t care less. If he could care less, then he would seem to care too much.
    I just finished proofreading a book about arthritis, and the physician who wrote it kept referring to a treatment “regime.” The word he should have used, of course, is “regimen.” (Don’t know the difference? Find out here.) Now, if you look this up in a descriptive dictionary rather than a prescriptive style manual, or visit a site like this maintained by an apologist for lazy language, you’ll see it claimed that “regime” is OK usage in this case because people have been misapplying the word for centuries. Well, just because it’s done doesn’t mean it’s right. People steal, rape and murder, but those are not approved actions in our society, and neither should be the use of “regime” instead of “regimen.” (Not that lazy usage is equivalent to murder, but someday it could drive me to murder.)
    We have a rich language that’s being diluted by people who can’t maintain a good-sized, active vocabulary. It’s our language, folks. Use it or lose it.