Classical music

Let's make one point very clear at the outset. Oftentimes, I get student papers that refer to Beethoven's fifth song or Tchaikovsky's first piano song. Is that right No, that's not good at all. Are these songs What do you have to have to make something a song Lyrics. You got to have a text. So we don't have, in eighty percent of classical music, we don't have lyrics. We don't have a text. Well, yes, with opera, of course. But the other eighty percent is purely instrumental music. It works. It's magic, again, through purely instrumental means. So we can't really call those songs. And this puzzled me. One day, I was sitting there at iTunes, and I wanted to buy an interior movement of a Mozart serenade. So I was all set to purchase this. And it said, buy song. Boom. That told me the answer. That's where this terminology comes into play. Because on iTunes, we buy songs. It could be purely instrumental, but it's called buy a song. But we don't want to use that sort of parlance. We want to be a bit more sophisticated than that, if you will, and use other terms. So we'll talk generally about Beethoven's composition, or Beethoven's piece, or Beethoven's work, or his masterwork, or chef d'oeuvre, however fancy you want to get with it.