As for Love Songs, Tender and Sentimental...

As for love songs, tender and sentimental or mournful tunes expressing final and fateful decisions, they overflowed with sensuous language. How, then, was it possible for proper music to emerge? However, the popular taste reveled in the new and strange. In the presence of classical music, which is mellow and full of dignity, people would stretch and yawn; but when they listened to the eccentric language [of the Liu Sung love-songs], they would slap the thigh and begin to hop up and down like sparrows. This marked the first step toward a state of affairs in which both poetry and music were tinged by the influence of Cheng.

—Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chapter 7 (translated by Vincent Yu-chung Shih)