Musical Sounds: Moral or Amoral?

Meaning, you consider your statements "godly." Okay.

What? And do your homework for you? (was that a fitting statement?)

Agreed.

 

I didn't reject it. I said it was too vague, besides the dictionaries and encyclopedias will focus only on music theory. I have seen only one that actually mentioned the meaning of music.

Why do people who have no instruction in music theory like music? How do they perceive some sets of ordered sounds as music and others as not?

Music is the nonverbal, human communication of mood, demeanor or attitude with a set of tones existing in a specific harmonic relationship with one another arranged in a manner as to elicit a specific emotional response in the listener.

 

I can almost agree completely with this, but the word "specific" trips it up. The author/composer/player may want to create a specific emotional response, but that falls to the listener. The same piece of music played for different audiences will have different responses, many of which were not the intention or aim of the composer.

What I call music and what someone else calls music may very well be different things. The same goes for everyone else in the world.

To try to pin some kind of morality on music itself is just plain silly (for want of a better word, or one that would be insulting). Is the sound of breaking glass sinful? How about a baby's cry? Static? Running water? Laughter? After all, if one is going to slap the label of sinful on sound you might as well label them all the same way because ::gasp:: they are all sounds.

I figured this would be another legalistic grandstand... and I was right.

If music is so evil why do you allow ANY of it within your church? Or in your life?

 

That the sound of music itself can convey sinister and evil feeling in the listener is well known. Watch any horror movie and you will realize that the most tense and scariest moments in the movie are created by the background music, not what you are actually watching. You see the girl walk into the room, nothing scary about that. But the background music causes you to feel tense and perhaps even afraid. The music, not the video causes you to feel something terrible is about to happen to her.

I have been playing guitar 40 years, no big deal, but I know about the famous tri-tone, the flatted fifth interval. This is commonly called the "devil's interval". There are many modern rock songs that incorporate this sound to give a sense of evil.

Here is a fellow demonstrating this interval in church. This interval has been understood for centuries and at one time was banned by the church.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gviCJw3BqfQ

 

Not true.

When you further consider the advent of harmony (in which there has been use of only the three chords of the tonic, dominant(5th) and subdominant (4th)) to harmonize all the 7 scale-notes in most of the folk melodies known, this further underscores that these three notes and their overtones were fundamental influences in the formation of the scale's notes. Even the names that evolved for them are perfect representations of their acoustic role, even though the names ('dominant' 'sub-dominant' & keynote/tonic) were also coined by people without acoustical knowledge.

Now either all this is the greatest coincidence on earth -- that is, people who knew nothing of acoustics coming up with scales reflecting all these acoustic properties purely by chance -- or else, in fact, the ear was already able to discern the sounds as distinct between harmonious or dissonant because the ear could hear these acoustic properties without consciously knowing they existed. http://www.greenwych.ca/natbasis.htm
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That's not music.

That's not music either.

Nor this.

Again, not music.

It might help your case if you stuck to the subject of music, and you could do that better if you knew what music was, and how it differs from the noises you described.

Who said music was evil?

Once again, music is communication, a conscious, intelligent act. The Bible doesn't let you classify conscious, intelligent acts as amoral.

 

Aaron believes that emotions in worship are wrong. Virtually a gnostic view.

It leaves no room for finding any ground for discussion.

 

Cinnamon is not an act, and there is no such thing as happy or sad cinnamon. Music is an act, and there is such a thing as happy or sad music.

If you want to discuss music, then discuss music—not food.

And for the thousandth time, music is an intelligent, premeditated ACT. It is an act of communication. It is, therefore, moral. You cannot escape that conclusion. Not biblically.

 

Quit making up stories, rbell. I'll speak for myself.

 

Unfortunately, defining music as moral or immoral in an of itself (that is, divorced from the behavior of the singer/musician) is pretty tough to do. Primarily because Scripture doesn't give us a list of good or evil music genres.

 

Escpecially since music IS the behavior of the performer. It IS human interaction.

It doesn't have to. It tells us what the manner of our interaction should be.

 

No they aren't. They're objects.

You're getting closer with this. A scheme is not an object, it is an idea—a thought, and it is moral.

So?

I wouldn't be so sure. rbell is still smarting from an exchange from a couple years back. But I'm just wondering where it is that my argument was anything like you're saying it is. Where have I said, music affects emotions, therefore music is sinful?

Not only is this a false statement, it's off topic.

It isn't true

Again, not my argument.

Go back and read my posts. I've tried to keep my wording at a fifth-grade reading level, so it shouldn't pose too much of a challenge for you, but I've been wrong before.

 

So what is the "manner of interaction" with a bass guitar?

 

I am not a musician, but wouldn't it be similar to the low notes on a harp.

 

HUMAN interaction. The reason one plays a bass is to interact with a human, whether that human is himself or another.