Reframing policy, implementation and evaluation: an analogy from music

Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .

Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.

John Y. Lawrence (2023). Lyricist as Analyst: Rhyme Scheme as Music-Setting in the Great American Songbook. Music Theory Spectrum XX: 1 – 15 (accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/mts/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/mts/mtad015/7492927?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.

That policy instead is the music and that implementers are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. Also revealing is the notion that “fits better” means “fits suggestively” for ongoing interpretations: namely, future evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.

Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its implementation is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, repeated evaluation, not implementation on its own, is a de facto policymaking without closure. Or if you will, this is its own kind of democracy.