Metaphors and Meaning in the Turkish Contemporary Christian Music

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.