Popular music is engineered by people in the entertainment industry, and sales are the arbiter of success (hence the enormous sums earned by the writers of often-played commercials)…

At the other end of the power spectrum is great religious music. Here the texts deal with the great mysteries of life; the music to which they are set, exactly because of its non-specific nature, is uniquely qualified to illumine these ponderings on the meaning of life, on love and loss, on suffering and transcendence.

Through time and tone it is possible to construct an architecture of order, a glimpse of an ideal world. We can be transformed by adapting our thoughts to these eternal physical realities, which help us to overcome our very real limitations.

from The Anatomy of Melody: Exploring the Single Line of Song