Musical and Social Meaning in the Fabric and Landscape of Music

Musical and Social Meaning in the Fabric and Landscape of Music                                   Copyright © 2020 by Garen L. Wolf I 

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Musical and Social Meaning—part 1

          Note to readers:  If you are new to my blog you should be aware that in the daily posts in a series there will be no attempt to conclude or necessarily draw final conclusions.  Also, I am placing the “end notes” at the beginning of the blog series so that the reader may take advantage of these definitions as he or she reads the daily posts. 

End Notes

[1] Musical codes is used here in the sense that social meaning is imbedded in the music.

2 Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

3 Metalanguage as used here means that music is capable of communicating beyond the restraints of written communication.

4 Metacommunication as used here refers to communication that surrounds what a person says or musics that also has meaning. This meaning (in the music part of the music) may or may not be congruent with what that person intended to music. Since this communication is implicit and not expressed in words, it may support or contradict the verbal communication of the words spoken or sung. 

5 Metacognition is thinking about thinking used here in the sense that the one who has experienced music later muses on his thoughts and emotions that were triggered during the previous musical experience.  These thoughts are self-reflective, so much so, that the person who experienced the music actually relives the musical experience.

6 An axiom is a statement or proposition which is regarded by someone as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.

7Paralanguage was coined In the 1970s, by Gregory Bateson.  This term has come to mean nonverbal communication such as your tone of voice, pitch, intonation, speed of speaking, hesitation, noises, gestures, and facial expressions. The reason that a Christian must consider paralanguage is that it is a sort-of subset of meta-communication that often affects sacred musicing.  Paralanguage has the propensity to partially or even completely change the original meaning of sacred music. It is sometimes considered to only nuance nonphonemic properties of sacred music—i.e. words whose pronunciation and spelling do not match.  However, such a definition is too restrictive since paralanguage may consciously or unconsciously affect worship music much more than phonetically.

There is a continuing argument among practicing musicians and music philosophers about what music is and what it communicates (if anything) and how its meaning (if it has meaning) relates (or doesn’t relate) to the real world around us. Music signs, triggers, codes and symbols that are believed by some to exist in the fabric of music are a discussion of much interest to 21^st century music philosophers. By the term the fabric of music I mean musical practices which are influenced from, protocols, interactions and gestures from religious, social and music performance practices and from content imbedded in the music part of music.  This fabric, that comes from inside and outside of the music, affects the way a person musics and it also influences the end result of his or her music performance and ipso facto the information that is transmitted from his or her religious musicing. 

These imbedded elements in the music part of the music, and the way the musicer musics, facilitates the understandable meaning that the musicing transmits to the listener even though these elements from its fabric and landscape may go partially or completely unnoticed by the uninformed performer and listener.  Thus the term fabric refers to imbedded (embodied) elements such as signs, codes and/or symbols in the musical content i.e. the music’s formal properties, and landscape refers to referential meaning (designated meaning) and from the extra-musical influences which are a part of the performance practice--combined they form the fabric and landscape that unavoidably imbeds and surrounds the musicer’s religious musicing.