Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Is Musical Style Involved in Communicating Meaning? Part 3

Is Musical Style Involved in Communicating Meaning?  Part 3
Berglund also touched on another concept that is particularly germane to the discussion of appropriateness of church music with his mention of style implications.We all recognize music by its style. Style recognition involves the communication of auditory musical information incorporated in instrumental and or vocal tones that are systematically distinguishable to the listener.  This auditory information is communicated to the listener from the structured execution of a particular music.  Thus it becomes recognizable as a particular musical style.  Robert Berglund believes that,”…it is through musical style that music assumes much of its meaning to the listeners.  Certainly in vocal music concrete meaning is arrived at by texts.  But as far as music is concerned, meaning, both concrete and abstract, designative and embodied, is generally arrived at through style.  In other words, as people are aware of style and its implications through conditioning and psychological associations along with their intuitions, music assumes meaning.” A Philosophy of Church Music by Robert Berglund p. 22 
                Music finds its place in the multiplicity of style classifications by  how it presents itself.  All music has purpose and that purpose causes it to take on stylistic characteristics that are the means of communicating its meaning to the listener.  Every astute composer desires to draw the listener into the emotion and meaning expressed in the music.  For this reason, a Christian musician must become familiar with just what the music part of a particular style of music is attempting to communicate to the auditor.
            Although it is true that every garage or basement musical group is not necessarily a skillful communicator of a particular style of music, many of them are because they apply the style patterns to the building blocks of the music they are composing, arranging and performing—thereby the music becomes a communicator of the desired meaning.  Since the time of the Coryville jazz groups in New Orleans and the Chicago and Kansas City jazz inventions, jazz has been successful in transmitting sexual meaning to its listeners.  The same success may be said of the rock-n-role of Elvis Presley and those who followed him in that style.  Probably the most successful communicator of sexual meaning, without doubt has been the many sub-styles of rock music.  
 For a Christian musician to make a claim that the aforementioned music styles were and are not capable of communicating their desired meaning is naive and short sighted.  To contend that these styles of music were and are benign and therefore not capable of communicating meaning is to deny music’s great power which is delivered with the help of these style meanings.  The music part of music molded by style becomes a powerful communicator of musical meaning which is related to the real world around all of us.

 

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