Is Music a Language?—part 5

Is Music a Language?—part 5

          With this in mind one can more easily come to the hypothesis that the music part of music is either more valuable or more dangerous to the whole-life of the individual who is encountering it in direct relationship to that person’s understanding of the music genre being listened to or performed.  So, the more understanding one receives from the music part of the music, the more effect the encounter with the music will have on the individual.

          Earlier I made reference to music as a metalanguage.  (This consideration of what music “is” is, like the other categorizations, not without complication,)  There are several definitions of metalanguage one of them is that it is any symbolic system used to discuss, describe, or analyze another language or symbolic system. Viewing the formal properties of music as metalanguage allows one to consider it to be another “language” that is, if you please, “meta” or self-referential in the aspect that the way the building blocks of music are artistically arranged communicates meaning and that this meaning can more or less effectively become “symbols” that are capable of, as Bloomberg would perhaps say, “decode” information.

Thought for the Day

1Corinthians 10:12 reminds Christians, “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”  I believe that this admonition extends to the effect that music has on all of us. The person who denies that music has the power to be valuable or dangerous to the whole-life of the individual should at least consider this admonition from the writer of the first  letter to the Christians at Corinth.