So the other day Stephen Fry wrote a long blog post about pop versus classical music, and his specific reason for preferring the latter. I've seen a couple of posts discussing whether he was right, but reading the post has reminded me that when I was a child I also preferred classical music for a specific reason, but the reason was completely different.

The thing I disliked about pop music when I was young was that there wasn't enough music in it. Specifically, the same verse and chorus section tended to be repeated several times throughout a song, pretty much exactly unchanged except for the lyrics sung over the top of it. But, at the time, I just wasn't very interested in lyrics compared to music; so I tended to feel shortchanged by four minutes of pop song compared to the same length of classical music, because the latter tended to have more different music packed into its four minutes whereas the pop would only have one minute's worth of tune repeated over and over.

(The observant will notice that this isn't really about classical music; it's about instrumental music. And, indeed, I eventually worked that out for myself: the first modern musician to really hold my interest was Jean Michel Jarre, largely because his music was instrumental.)

I got over it in the end. I now like lyrics as much as the next person, and I have no fundamental problem with repetitive tunes any more as long as the lyrics make them worth my while.

But musical and lyrical variety don't have to be mutually exclusive; even in verse-and-chorus structured songs, it's possible to have melodic or harmonic evolution between successive instances of the verse and/or chorus, and the occasional song which manages that still makes me particularly happy. There needn't even be very much of it, as long as it's done well: for example, there's a two-note change between two choruses in the Sisters' ‘First and Last and Always’ which has always struck me as just right. And the subtle tweaks to the tune between successive verses of Steve Vai's ‘The Silent Within’ make me rather fond of the song in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it at all otherwise.