“Most singing that we hear has words, and, although the singer may depart from those words for bar after bar of vocal gymnastics (as in a bel canto aria, for instance), we know that in the end we shall be returned to the text. It doesn’t matter that the text may be more of a pretext for music than a real text conveying important information. Nor does it seem to matter very much to many people if the text that is being sung happens to be in a language they do not understand. A song that has no text at all takes us into a different world.”