Interesting reformed church visit today, a report card.

ALAYMAN said:
Much to my shame and admitted ignorance, I don’t have a clue about reading notes, chords, or arrangements. My argument is about the inability to discern authorial meaning or intent. I think the passage that biscuit referred to earlier from Corinthians about an “uncertain sound” carries weight towards that end.
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I suspect this is true of many music activists, even the ones claiming expertise: they can talk a good story about chords, instrumentation, rhythm, etc. having moral significance--but when asked to interpret those things, they'll come up dry. Needless to say, I've never seen it done, practically.

Even biscuit's assertion comes down to him not liking extreme metal. Well, neither do I. I'm just not willing to call it wrong or evil without concrete evidence.
 
Ransom said:
“You were trying to make it sound stupid. You emphasized the repeated lyrics more than the song itself does. That was disingenuous.”
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Down,down,down was growled out 36 times. You can at least be honest about it.
 
biscuit1953 said:
Down,down,down was growled out 36 times. You can at least be honest about it.
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Sure, if you want. Honestly, you deliberately omitted most of the lyrics that weren't "down, down, down."

As I said ... disingenuous. Trying to paint the song in a poorer light than it actually was. Intellectually dishonest.

Feel free to "agree to disagree." That's what you do when you can't admit you've been cornered and defeated.
 
ALAYMAN said:
Chords don’t provide meaning without composition and intent of the composer. When that process happens it enters the realm of morality, as subjective as that may be in making a determination about the nature of the composition.
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Chords convey emotion. A major chord is going to convey a light springy feel while a minor chord is going to convey a more somber feeling. The other chords listed are variations of the minor or major chords; some are smooth and take the listener to a safe place while others introduce a bit of dissonance like the tang of vinegar or leave the listener hung out waiting for resolution.

I haven't even gotten into modes. I don't understand them completely; I've heard them described and can relate to the feeling they give music.

I have heard various preeechers yammer on about the power of music to stir up emotions and how ungodly it is to let ourselves be swayed by various music, whether it makes us want to praise God or go out and sin up a storm.
 
ALAYMAN said:
Chords don’t provide meaning without composition and intent of the composer. When that process happens it enters the realm of morality, as subjective as that may be in making a determination about the nature of the composition.
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Music has an effect on the hearer. A measured and irresistable effect. Like speech, music is an act. An intelligent will is required to make music. You can't find it growing in the woods or dig a mine for it. It is a mode of non-verbal, human communication. It is a work, and will, therefore, be judged as good or evil.

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.

Of course it is moral, and its morality is judged the way any other action or attitude is judged.
 
R.C. Sproul discusses music and its impact on us. You don’t have to be a music major to realize how we are influenced by it in a negative or positive way.

(11:13) “I’ve seen two interviews of young murderers on death row – two different interviews, two different guys – both of whom murdered their parents as part of an initiation ritual for a satanic cult. So in order to prove themselves worthy of the cult, they carried out the massacre of their own parents. And in both interviews, these young people were asked how they progressed from their childhood thinking and worldview to this kind of behavior... Both of them said that they had a straight line in their experience from their addiction to hard-core pornography to Satanism to murder. But what I found most fascinating is that they both said that they got turned on to pornography and violence from a previous addiction to heavy metal music.”

(19:31) “You take a child who goes in and discovers the piano in your living room and wants to be a musician and sits down and starts banging on the piano and hitting several notes at the same time, but you notice immediately that what you’re hearing is not music, because all of the principles of proportionality and of intervals that make up proper harmony have been violated and now that sound is reduced to an irritating noise.”

 
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I am no expert on chords or musical theory in general. But I am very skeptical of the position that we can paste Christian lyrics onto any style of music, and thus produce God-honoring music.

How about the song "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" in which Bob Dylan guffaws his way through, to the accompaniment of a band playing in a raucous, chaotic and ramshackle style, and he ends each verse with "Everybody Must Get Stoned." Could we rewrite it with Christian lyrics and change the words to "Everybody Must Get Saved" and would this honor God and advance the cause of the gospel, if we performed it in church? Would that style of music, or the Enoch garbage, qualify as "psalms, hymns and spiritual songs?"

(If I get criticized for this post, it's okay. Like the song says, "everybody must get stoned," which according to Dylan was a reference to the inevitability of being subjected to harsh judgment).
 
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