Why ‘Songs’ and not ‘Pieces’ ?
Nov.28, 2025
On my website, I use the word ‘Songs’ to refer to my musical works. Since they don’t have lyrics, I think ‘Pieces’ or ‘Pieces of music’ would be the correct term, but there are some reasons why I use ‘Songs’.
The first reason is that I often compose with the feeling of singing. When I created the melody for my 1st song Oh! Italia, I actually sang it out loud to compose it.
For this song, I didn’t write lyrics and I just sang the melody “Ta Laa La Laa La…”, but for Silver Grass – Gold Moon, I wrote the lyrics and composed the song.
However, writing lyrics also requires the poetic talent. (And I don’t have it.)
Also, unlike music, words are highly specific, so I can only write about things about Japan that I know well. So, this is the only song for which I wrote lyrics, and for the others, I create melodies with “feeling like I’m singing.”
In the end, the lyrics I made for this song were not used.
If you are interested, please see the article ” The Making of ‘Silver Grass – Gold Moon“
The second reason is that in Japan, the English word ‘Piece’ is not well known as a musical piece. Most Japanese people know the meaning of ‘Piece’ as ‘Fragment’.
Online automatic Japanese translation also translate the single word ‘Pieces’ to ‘KAKERA’ which means fragments. So I can’t write ‘Pieces’ at the top of my page. But ‘Pieces of Music’ is too long. I want to write my contents list in one word each: “Songs / Composing / Profile.”
Then how about I write articles in Japanese and overseas readers use online translator? But that doesn’t work either.
The online Japanese-to-English translator still produces incorrect translations. A common mistake is when the subject should be ‘I’ but becomes ‘you’ or ‘we’ instead. There are other mistakes too. As a result, the sentence can become rude, so this is also unacceptable.
For these reasons, I use the term ‘Songs’ on my site to refer to musical works. Mendelssohn’s piano pieces also include “Songs Without Words.” Since I compose my pieces with a feeling of singing, they can be called ‘Songs’ even without lyrics.