`AUSTRALIAN SONGS: Home

ASK US A QUESTION via EMAIL

Please provide us with as much information as possible about your research question. 

Song cycles were performed by Aboriginal tribes long before the white man appropriated this country in the late eighteenth century. Soon after the colony began, however, verse of a recognisably British kind started to be written.

Australian songs have captured our history, the pride we feel in our country and some show our famous Aussie humour.

What is the difference between poetry and song lyrics?

Words in a poem take place against the context of silence (or maybe an espresso maker, depending on the reading series), whereas lyrics take place in the context of a lot of deliberate musical information: melody, rhythm, instrumentation, the quality of the singer’'s voice, other qualities of the recording, etc. Without all that musical information, lyrics usually do not function as well, precisely because they were intentionally designed that way. The ways the conditions of that environment affect the construction of the words (refrain, repetition, the ways information that can be communicated musically must be communicated in other ways in a poem, etc.) is where we can begin to locate the main differences between poetry and lyrics.

To say that this means song lyrics are less literary than poems, or require less skill or intelligence or training or work to create, is patently absurd (and, in the case of rap music, patronizing). But that does not mean that song lyrics are poems. They might sometimes accidentally function like poems when taken out of a musical context, but abstracting lyrics from musical information is misleading and beside the point. It seems to me far more productive to ask how lyrics in songs relate to musical information, and how poems relate to the silences (cultural and actual) that surround them, and to recognize that lyrics and poetry, while different genres with different forces and imperatives, have both more and less in common than we might think, and are endeavors of equal value.

From Poetry on the Brink Forum, response by Matthew Zapruder

Aboriginal dancers and songwriters talk about the importance of spirituality and culture across the diverse styles of Aboriginal music and dance. Footage of a stage performance showcases one example of Aboriginal performance art.

SOURCE: ClickView, (2014) Duration 4:18