Musical
Sound Communicates Meaning- Part 4
I
know that I am a lonely philosophical voice crying in the twenty-first century
“wilderness”. However, I have this
Scripture, and more, to back up my philosophical hypothesis that the formal
properties of every piece of music do have the potential to affect the
whole-life of the performer and the auditor. Therefore, I believe it is
philosophically and morally dangerous for a person to fill his or her mind with
the formal properties of a piece of music without having a thorough
understanding of what this music genre is capable of doing to the whole life of
an individual.
We
are constantly warned that we should not eat anything without having knowledge
of what it has the potential to do to our body, because there is such a strong
belief that “we are what we eat”. I
contend that we are not only “what we eat” but also “what we listen to and
perform musically”. Since sound communicates meaning, Christian musicians have
the responsibility to be aware of how sound affects their “whole life”.
Thought
for the Day
For centuries Christian musicians very
carefully made church music choices based on the philosophical concepts of
sacred vs. profane music. Somewhere in
the twentieth century profane music disappeared in the minds of some Christian
musicians.
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