The Recovering Choir Director

Mr. Keilholtz continues discussing music and morality in his latest post about timbre. While not answering the role that timbre plays in the morality of music (yet), he illustrates the difficulty (impossibility?) of attempting to quantify timbre. Below is an excerpt of my comment to his post (edited for grammar).

What does timbre have to do with morality? Most of the essays online that discuss morality in music may have omitted a lengthy discourse on timbre because it’s such a difficult thing to objectively describe. However, I’m starting to believe that timbre is of huge importance.

The reason I used the examples of human voice, woodwind, electric guitar and fingernails on chalkboard in scoring the Josquin in my comments to the previous post is because of my reaction to the sounds of each.

In this case, the well-trained human voices would be superior because the human voice is the only instrument which can combine words with pitch (barring synth samples and other electronica), and the Josquin employs pitches and words. The recorders would come in second; while their timbre generally is similar to the human voice on account of their design, the words would be lost. The full-distortion guitars would be tolerable, and just the thought of having the Josquin played by fingernails on chalkboard is repulsive.

Granted, there is much timbral variation between and among all of these examples (what does full distortion mean, anyway?), and I don’t know how much this offers to the discussion. But I guess regarding the question of timbre on human disposition and action, I could ask a subjective question: What would listening to fingernails on chalkboard for an hour do to you?

If anyone reading this is brave enough to listen to fingernails on a chalkboard for a full hour, please get back to me with a report.

And here are a few articles on the morality of music:

• Morality in Music—John Peters
• Music and Morality—William Kilpatrick
• The Moral Power of Music—Fr. Basil Nortz