Why Music Does Not Need to Be “Understood”

I did not arrive at this question because I recently encountered some new theory of music. It comes from many years of listening to music, singing, and playing the piano.

Many years ago, when I still often sang karaoke, I was like many other people: I sang a great many songs with lyrics. When you sing them, you can become deeply involved. Sometimes the words even seem to have been written for you. Love, heartbreak, homesickness, family affection and separation — almost everyone can find songs that correspond to something in their own life. At an emotional moment, you can sing with real feeling. The lyrics overlap with your own experience, and the resonance is immediate.

Yet I gradually noticed something. After singing for an hour or two, or even longer, I did not return to a quiet environment with the sense of inner calm that one might expect after being nourished by music. More often, I felt tired. When the external sound suddenly stops, of course there is a feeling of quiet, but it is more like the calm after a storm. The noise has gone, so things are quiet; that does not necessarily mean that the mind itself has become quiet. Genuine inner calm can remain relatively stable even when the surrounding environment is still noisy.

Over many years, experiences like these led me to a judgement: what we commonly call “listening to music” is very often listening to lyrics, and what we call “understanding” a piece of music may simply mean understanding the story told by the words. Later, as I played the piano myself and listened to more music without lyrics, that judgement became more concrete.

This brings me to an interesting linguistic habit. When people in China speak of musical creation, they very easily think first of “writing songs”. If someone says that they create music, people often ask what songs they have written. In Western musical usage, by contrast, composition more readily suggests composing music. Songs are certainly part of musical creation, but musical creation is not naturally identical with songwriting.

This is only a surface-level linguistic phenomenon, but it may reflect a deeper difference in musical culture. To what extent is contemporary Chinese musical culture centred on songs? If we compared the new music publicly released each year in China, the United States and Australia, what proportion would consist of songs and what proportion of instrumental works without lyrics? There is no readily available authoritative statistic that answers this directly, but the question is not impossible to investigate. Annual releases from record companies and streaming platforms, copyright registrations, catalogue classifications, charts and listening data could all provide samples.

Listening figures, of course, cannot simply be treated as creation figures. An old song such as “The Moon Represents My Heart” can continue to be played for decades, while a small number of highly popular works can account for a disproportionate share of listening. But these distortions can be adjusted for by restricting the sample to new releases, reducing the weight of head titles, distinguishing new music from older repertoire, and cross-checking the result against annual copyright and industry data. The result might not be a number precise to several decimal places, but it should be possible to obtain a meaningful range. This part still requires further empirical verification.

The numerical difference, however, is not what interests me most. The more important question is how we understand music.

Traditional Chinese music contains many instrumental works with explicit titles and images. “High Mountains and Flowing Water” evokes landscape and friendship; “Ambush from Ten Sides” places the listener directly in a historical battle; “A Moonlit Night on the Spring River” carries a strongly literary title. Before the music even begins, the title has already offered the listener a direction in which to interpret it. We readily place instrumental music within a landscape, a story, an experience of life or a particular emotional setting.

This is certainly not unique to Chinese music. Western music also contains a great deal of programme music. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is explicitly connected with rural experience, while Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique has a remarkably specific narrative. Conversely, not every Chinese piece depends on a literary story. Some works transmitted through tune names, formal patterns or musical structures have titles that do not carry a complete narrative.

What is worth noticing is that Western classical music also developed a very strong and independent tradition of music that does not require a prior story. The preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and the many sonatas and concertos of Mozart and Beethoven named by number, key and form, do not require the listener to be given a story first. Pachelbel’s Canon in D is another familiar example. “Canon” tells us first of all about a musical structure; it does not tell us whether the music is supposed to mean love, farewell, happiness or sorrow.

So the distinction cannot simply be that Chinese music has titles while Western music does not. Both do. The more interesting possible difference lies in the degree to which musical cultures depend on literary interpretation on the one hand and autonomous musical structure on the other. That difference affects not only composition, but also how ordinary listeners learn to hear music.

Many people say that they “cannot understand” music. Without lyrics, they do not know what the music is saying; once lyrics appear, they feel that they understand it. But what they understand may primarily be the lyrics rather than the music.

My experience of karaoke many years ago was one important source of this judgement. Lyrics place music within a relatively definite semantic environment. Songs about love, homesickness and family affection, in particular, often contain a degree of drama. A song lasts only a few minutes. Within those minutes it has to establish a situation, create movement, build towards a climax and complete some kind of emotional effect. The singer may be deeply involved, but that involvement often means that emotion is being repeatedly activated. Excitement, memory, reluctance, pain and expectation can appear in rapid succession. The resonance is real, but it can also keep the inner state in continuous motion.

This does not mean that music with words must make people restless. Chanting, religious vocal music and much meditation music also use voices and words, but the text is often very simple and highly repetitive. Its meaning does not require the listener to follow a continuously developing story. In such cases the words can recede behind the musical structure. The mouth may chant and the sound may repeat, but language is no longer carrying a complex narrative function. In that sense, such music moves closer to pure music, somewhere between the conventional song and music without a fixed semantic direction.

This also helps explain why some music does not need a definite literary title.

Take Canon in D. I am playing the piece myself now, but my understanding of this point is not something I have only recently acquired. The name “canon” tells us primarily about its musical form; it does not prescribe whether the listener should be happy or sad. The same music can be played at a wedding and can also belong in a setting of farewell or remembrance. Human emotion is not singular. A wedding certainly contains joy, but union also involves separation, transition and farewell. Reluctance, expectation, tenderness and even a slight shade of melancholy can coexist within it.

If we insist on assigning a definite emotion — calling it a “happy canon” or a “sad canon” — we may actually reduce what the music can contain. One important quality of art may be precisely that it cannot be made too definite. Once everything is fixed, much of what art can hold disappears.

Lyrics have another, more important limitation.

Language unfolds essentially linearly in time. One word follows another, one sentence follows another, and meaning advances in sequence. Music can sustain several layers at once. Different voices can move forward simultaneously; they can converse, cross, pursue and answer one another. Harmony creates another level of relationship. Rhythm has its own movement. Keys and modes can change. While one voice moves forward, another may be answering it, while a third layer creates a different kind of tension.

Lyrics are therefore only one dimension within music. If our listening is continually led by the words, it is rather like compressing a multidimensional space into a single line. We may still have a powerful experience, but at the same time we may lose a great deal of information in the music that language cannot directly express.

That is why I have long thought that genuinely learning to appreciate music means not asking only, “What is it saying?” Nor should the absence of lyrics lead us to say that we cannot “understand” it. Sometimes we need to put the words aside for a while, resist the urge to find a story or prescribe a definite emotion, and instead listen to how the melody develops, how different voices meet and separate, how harmony creates and releases tension, how rhythm drives the music forward, and how musical elements answer, conflict with and transform one another.

Music theory reveals these rich relationships that are already present in the music. Theory does not add meaning to music; it helps us hear what we had not previously noticed.

From this perspective, music may matter precisely because it does not need to translate everything into language. Language can make many things clear, but music can hold emotions that are contradictory, difficult to name and nevertheless real. To appreciate music may not mean finally knowing what it “means”, but gradually becoming able to hear how many layers were there all along.