Is Music a Language? Part 2

 Is music a Language? Part 2

              I believe that every musician who performs music and every person who listens to music brings something outside of music to the music experience.  All too little has been written about the multiplicity of emotions, opinions, or ways of “knowing” that each person brings from the outside world to a music listening or performance experience.  Every person brings something from his or her music aesthetic to the worship experience or the secular music experience.

            No one is capable of listening to or performing music in a vacuum.  Music cannot be perceived by the human mind in a “space”  or "bubble" which has nothing at all in it from life experiences.  Music psychologists have shown that a human fetus perceives music and responds to it before birth.  Kinder-Music enthusiasts have shown us that the newborn infant can and will respond to music if proper stimulation is provided.  Therefore, I believe that no one perceives music in a closed system without reference to the real world.  This view places me, at least partially, in the camp of the referentialists who believe that all musicing and all listening of music is affected by the references one brings to the great art of music from the world outside of music.

            This brings me to the conclusion that a Christian music aesthetic must be referential.  Although I believe that music is referential, I am not a strict referentialist because, I do not believe that all of music’s meaning is outside of the music.  If one were to believe this, he or she would believe that music is powerless without its references to things outside of the actual music. On the contrary, I believe that music’s sounds, i.e. the music part of music is very powerful.  Where I part philosophical company with the non-referentialists is that I do not believe that music is a closed system, and therefore, a law to itself.

            A Christian’s study of the philosophy of beauty in secular or sacred music is referential.  Many secular philosophers consider aesthetics to be that part of philosophy that deals with beauty in music as rather distinguished from music’s useful or moral value.  Since the Christian must “know” in reference to God and His creative ownership of beauty in music, he or she must not develop a music philosophy independent of its ethical or moral nature and value.  Therefore, music will always derive its ethical and moral value outside of itself and ipso facto from God.  Furthermore, if it does not have ethical and moral value, its meaning is in conflict with the moral nature of God.