Music and literature are languages that attempt to communicate stories or character impressions. Like different languages, they are rich in their own traditions and have their own shortcomings and strengths. Each can present concepts and ideas that the other weakly portrays. This is a fundamental difference. The two are not completely inseparable, and they share many common elements.
Music is the more ambiguous of the two.
That is to say that the interpretation of musical sounds is more prone to subjective coloring. One can write that a character is evil, or merely state that he is the devil, and the deed is done. But with music the communication of such a characteristic is trickier. One listener' s evil can be another listener's sorrow, or thoughtfulness, and so on. It can be argued that music truly cannot relate concrete stories, that it will fail without words to instruct the listener in his or her experience.