Aesthetics and Knowing

Aesthetics and Knowing

Donald Hodges said, “Aesthetics, sometimes called the study of beauty, is more fully concerned with the nature, value, and meaning of art. … Can art (music) reveal truth or help us to lead a moral life?”  A Concise Survey of Music Philosophy, by Donald Hodges: Routledge, NY, 2017, p. 4.  Certainly, every Christian musician should be concerned with the nature, value and meaning of the whole of music and musicing.  The musicer is responsible to understand what he or she is musicing.  Without this knowledge and understanding of that knowledge, one’s musicing has the ability to do more harm than good to all those who experience it.

How should we then music?  First of all, the musicer must have a thorough understanding of the essential nature  of what is being musiced in the context of worship.  Surely, it doesn’t take a PHD in music philosophy to recognize that the nature of some genres of music, make them  aesthetically incompatible with the purposes of worship.  Second, if music is going to have aesthetic value to the hearer it must have the propensity to be considered beautiful in the culture and community in which it is performed.  Third, the Christian musicer needs to understand that music does have the ability to communicate meaning to all who experience it in the context of worship.  Furthermore, at least part the meaning that music communicates in understandable meaning.  It is naive to believe that music has its own little world and space that is “music’s alone” and therefore what a musicer musics is benign without cause and effect.