Is Music a Language?—part 5

 

                    Is Music a Language?—part 5

          Since all music music communicates, the music part of music is either valuable or harmful to the whole life of the individual who is encountering it.  The hearer receives understanding 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.

          In a previous blog post in this series I made reference to music as a metalanguage.  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

It is shortsighted to believe that all musical roads lead to heaven.  Musicing sincerely is not enough.  Christian musicians must realize that one can be sincerely wrong.  Those who used to “bleed” sick patients were sincere but they were sincerely wrong.