Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: nick@lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Some thoughts on "Christian Music" (was Re: Petra Praise) Message-ID: Date: 7 Jan 90 02:55:31 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: LFCS Enya Admiration Society Lines: 43 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [In article iba@ics.uci.edu (Wayne Iba) asked about "what role music made by Christians should have" In article , rit!cs!ritcv!iav1917@cs (alan i. vymetalik) responded > Ah, I see someone picked up the underlying thought I wanted people > to pick up on. Not the commerciality. Not the spandex. Not just the > music itself. I've talked about this aspect to a couple of people > who e-mailed me directly. The point of my postings was just to > get people talking about this subject in general. --clh] Nice article, Alan... Would somebody care to define "Christian Music" for me...? Perhaps I missed some of this discussion. I could suggest that any Christian has a view of the world and its affairs, and a view of human feelings and emotions, which isn't shared by non-Christians, and so any music made by a Christian is Christian music, regardless of form, style or lyrics. Whether or not Christian "insight" into things makes Christian music inherently better or worse than other music is, of course, open to debate. Off the top of my head, the most beautiful music I can think off is pieces by Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, some bits of Tangerine Dream, some bits of Vangelis, and a few chunks of Shostakovitch. I doubt that all of these are/were Christian, but that doesn't make their musical communication any less intense, meaningful or beautiful. Presumably, I could (in principle, were I good enough...) fire up my collection of synthesisers and software and make Christian music (albeit without lyrics) as valid as somebody singing in church, since it would (hopefully) stem from common beliefs and be trying to communicate related ideas? This is a bit of a meandering line of thought, but if anybody has any feedback... > alan Nick. -- Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh. nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk !mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ "...all these moments... will be lost in time... like tears in rain."