You're simply mincing words and contradicting yourselves. When someone speaks of musical styles, he is describing music played in a certain manner. Take Baroque for example. It's not just music written between 1640 and 1750, it's music characterized by embellishment and terraced dynamics. Classical music is a broader term, but usually used to describe music typically played by symphony orchestras in styles remeniscent of Mozart. When someone mentions Classical music, we automatically know he isn't speaking of The Grateful Dead.
Classical, Rock, Bluegrass, New Age, Hymns, Southern Gospel, are all terms which describe a manner in which music is performed to the minds of anyone who is familiar with them. Try as you might, (and you're trying desperately) you cannot get around that fact, and Bonga Dale's posting of the dictionary definitions nails the lid on your coffin. (I mean really, Dale, did you think you were helping Daniel with that post?
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So, when anyone speaks of musical styles, he is speaking of the character and demeanor of the music, your attempts to redefine the terms notwithstanding.
Now to your content argument:
One thing you have to abandon is the worldly educational psychology you were taught, (I'm assuming you were certified by the state to teach) that one can employ form without content. You may have run across it when values clarification was discussed. You're not to teach values, but how do you direct your students to clarify their own values without influencing them one way or another? That's the goal with values clarification. Form without content. That's what you're belching in your style-of-presentation subterfuge. Even twenty years ago when I was a college swell, I could see the futility in that kind of thinking. There is no such thing as form without content.
Form is content. If I printed your pic and displayed it on my dartboard, it would say something wholly different about my thoughts concerning you than if I displayed it in a heart-shaped frame.
(You may not like either implication.)
It's the same way with music.
In fact the subject matter of a song and the way you want people to feel about it is the primary consideration when choosing a form/style/demeanor for the music. So, your assertion that "psalms, hymns and spiritual songs" describes verbal content only is merely a desperate attempt to wriggle from the crushing grip of reason. But it's your only possible escape, so you're sticking to it despite its obvious weaknesses, and despite the fact that your quite alone, as far as the recognized authorities are concerned with the passages, in that opinion.
Now, Bonga Dale, have you changed your opinion that the Scriptures teach us to use a variety of styles (in the way that you and I understood the term when I first asked you) ?
