Today in class the question was posed, “Is chanting music?”. This question proceeded to go unanswered and we moved on in the lecture. But, I would like to revisit this topic because it is an important question. Obviously, we did some demonstrative chants as a class and listened to gregorian chants both of which were musical (maybe). But, are all chants music? The answer is somewhat subjective but for myself, I would lean towards no. Not all chants are music.
First, the basic definition for music coming from Websters’ dictionary is, “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion”. The first part of this definition is very subjective, stating that music has to produce beauty. Obviously, not everything will contain beauty to everyone. In music, some might find that rap is beautiful to them but not classical or vice versa. Therefore, this part of the definition should not be what is considered for the definitive answer. Now chanting does fulfill the vocal sounds, but is it always harmonic I think not. This leads to the question if chanting does not fulfill all the criteria for music, can it be considered a form of music?
Before we answer that let’s do some separating. From this analysis will be excluded chants used that are inherently not musical such as those at sports games. But everything else is fair game for this analysis. For the others even though all might of them might not have write harmonies they still have the ability to be harmonized to which in my opinion makes them eligible to be called music.