I would like to illustrate this idea using a graphic based on one created by David Hesselgrave for his book Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally
that describes how communication works.
Figure 1 — The Communication Model
In this communication model you have the Sender who wants to pass a certain meaning on to the Receiver. The Sender encodes this meaning into a message using his personal preconceptions, world view, opinions, experience and faith matrix
. This message is then passed on to the Receiver, who decodes the message using her personal preconceptions, world view, opinions, experience and faith matrix.
The result will be a meaning that is shaded by the understanding of the Receiver. Added to this is the noise or interference worked by the culture, the milieu, and body language of each person. Sometimes the message can be totally lost to the interference or in the decoding process. The morality of the message is then determined first by the Sender, then by the Receiver and, depending on the filter of each, that can be very different for each person.
If we take this graphic and apply it to music it might look as follows:
Figure 2 — The Communication Model Applied to Music
The process becomes much more complicated here, because we often have another link involved, namely the Musician. We’ll assume for a moment that no lyrics are involved. The Song-writer writes the song using a certain melody, harmony, and rhythm. The Musician then takes this piece of music and interprets it, shading the meaning to her liking and plays the piece, which the Listener hears, who then filters the meaning and adds his own spin to the meaning. Then the meaning is affected in each transfer by the noise around the message transmission.
We must remember that the meaning of music is most often emotional. If a song resonates deeply with someone, it will cause an emotional response, whether positive or negative. If it doesn’t they’ll brush it off.
The morality of the music is then determined once more in the Song-writer, the Musician, or the Listener. And so the music becomes moral. When we add the lyrics to the song, we add a fourth dimension, because they, too, convey meaning and the song not only carries emotional meaning, but an intellectual one as well.
Let’s take for example, a worship song that is written by a God-fearing musician using a style that would be considered “moral” by everyone. A well-meaning Christian singer takes the song and sings it in front of an audience using a style that he thinks to be worshipful of God. However, one of the listeners finds that the style that the singer is using reminds them very much of breathy, sensual songs they hear on the radio and so are turned off from the worship aspect of the music. Is that music still moral or has it become immoral to the listener?
As you can see, if we follow this system of thought, things get more complicated and more responsibility is placed upon each link of the chain. The danger of the music-is-moral view, is that it takes away responsibility from each of the links in the chain, by simply naming certain styles as good and certain styles as bad.