Musical and Social Meaning… Part 2
Certainly, this discussion of musical and social meaning in music will
not settle all the arguments about meaning that is or is not communicated
through musicing. Neither will it settle the arguments about exactly how real-life
emotions, or on the contrary music’s benign “garden variety” of emotions (that
are music’s alone and therefore not related to real life), are aroused when one
experiences musicing. However, I hope that this discussion will shed some light
on these views and their relevance to sacred musicing. Furthermore, I hope that the reader will take
renewed interest the power of the emotiveness of religious musicing and also
develop an awareness of how the power of these emotions, that music is capable
of arousing in the listener, affects all sacred musicing. For a much more thorough treatment of musical
meaning see chapters 8, 9 and 10 of Music Philosophy in Christian
Perspective.
Liz Garnett stated in the Critical Musicology Journal , “That musical codes[i] can and do carry social
values has become something of a semiotic[ii] truism in recent years.” She went on to say, “So,
social meanings encoded in music now form part of our musicological landscape,
and their existence no longer needs to be strenuously argued. What is still in
dispute, however, is the status of these codes. Are they an inherent and
unavoidable part of the musical fabric, for example, or products of cultural listening
habits shaped by ideologically informed critical metalanguages? That is, are
the apparently socially oppressive messages carried by the staples of the
musical canon into which our culture has poured so much emotional investment an
inevitable part of their meaning, or will the development of new
interpretational frameworks allow them to speak to us in ways we find more
ideologically acceptable?”
[i] Musical codes is
used here in the sense that social meaning is imbedded in the music.
[ii] Semiotics is the
study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
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