I've been thinking about the whole lyrics/music question lately, especially because my 50/90 output seems to have solidified my position as a composer rather than a songwriter (reading Wikipedia articles has taught me that there is a difference). And I've decided a few things.
Most importantly, I've decided that I'm going to write almost exclusively for instruments only. I had been concerned that because I wasn't explicitly saying anything in my music (no lyrics) and because I wasn't even implying anything (in the way that classical music apparently tries to mirror emotional turmoil), my music wasn't really worth anything. I'm not trying to mean anything with it, so how can it mean anything? But then I remembered something I've learned over the past few years - most things don't have an inherent meaning. A lot of the things that we think are meaningful are just the result of a mutual agreement in a particular culture. Grammatical rules are a good example of this - there is no natural law that governs grammar; the only authority it has is people's agreeing to it. A lot of meaning - though not all - is the result of a mutual agreement of people within a culture.
I just reject the notion that good music has to have lyrics or has to represent something. (Though I realise that those may not be directly-stated beliefs among people, they certainly seem to be the norm.) I'm just trying to write things that sound good. More recently, I've been playing around with forms, but in some ways, that has the same goal - trying to write something that doesn't sound like everything else.
Besides, even if someone intends something in an artistic work, that's not always the same meaning that the receiver understands. It's unlikely that any two people will have the same ideas about every aspect of a novel. I don't think that this is any different.
Furthermore, I don't feel that a piece of music is the best way to convey information. In my opinion, text is a better method for story telling than audio. (Though explanations for that are a post for a different blog.) In fact, I believe that text is a better method for communicating almost everything. So rather than struggle with it and come up with something terrible, I'm just going to not.
At least for now....
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