Maybe your iPod thinks so, but for most of us "song" means a melody sung with words. Isn't there more to the world's music than songs? It turns out that, for Levitin, song is "a convenient shorthand for music in all its forms, to refer to any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics". Daniel Levitin, however, claims that "music has shaped the world through six kinds of songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love." What enduring principle lay behind the selection of just those six? We don't find out, because although this is a cheerfully wide-ranging book, it's certainly not a rigorous one. I f you were asked to divide the world's songs into categories, how would you do it? I asked a few friends, who came up with love, loss, sorrow, separation, beauty, praise, wonder, doubt, fear, dreams, anger, work, oppression, loneliness, nostalgia, homesickness and more.
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