Metaphors and Meaning in the Turkish Contemporary Christian Music

Year 2018, Volume: 2 Issue: 1, 78 - 95, 30.06.2018

Uğur Aslan

https://doi.org/10.33906/musicologist.439254

Cited By: 1

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the
musical experience, musical meaning, and metaphors in religious music in the
case of Turkish Contemporary Christian Music (TCCM). In the general sense, we
can say that Contemporary Christian Music simultaneously carries symbolic,
functional, and pragmatic meaning. Thus, this paper focuses on how Turkish
Christians apply metaphors in order to give meaning to TCCM in the process of
expressing experiences, and what other elements, unrelated to music, play a
role in this process. People use the metaphors in music in two ways: to explain
their experience of music and to give meaning to music, and to create music
according to their ideas or beliefs. In this context, music as practical
consciousness affects the metaphors used for musical practices as discursive
consciousness; but also metaphors as discursive consciousness affect musical
practices by creating proper sound in accordance with ideas or beliefs about
music. In the context of TCCM, metaphors are used for expressing supernatural
or transcendent experience as well as for sounding worship and link the worship
music to the religious belief.

Keywords

Metaphor, Musical Meaning, Musical Experience, Turkish Contemporary Christian Music

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