1. The first model is that the song is a single entity, with words and music essentially inseparable.
2. Second idea: a single song (words and music together, as in the first model) can be adapted, harmonized, performed, in multiple styles. A folksong becomes a Lied, or is sung in the flamenco style. Every iteration is different, occurs in a new context. A new context of performance/recording and a new context of reception.
3. A third conception. There is a poetic text, that may or may not have characteristics of the popular song tradition (however that is defined). Someone sets that text to music, in a style that may or may not refer to any particular style associated with that kind of text. Song is an artistic hybrid, the combination of two artistic media. The music overrides the original text, supplants it.
4. Should we then view the transformations of (2) as instances of (3)? Changes in the performance / reception of the song introduce a kind of analytic separation into the union of music and words. The song is no longer organically vernacular once it enters into all these other channels of reception.
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