Church Singing as a Social Discourse

Abstract

Church singing promotes the transmission of sociocultural relations, attitudes, values, categories and elements of Christianity through tangible signs and messages of verbal art. Church singing is presented here as a model of communication with self-organizing
process linking cognitive experience, value orientations and social practical activity. Church singing integrates phonetic symbols, singing and music into a structure of the norms and principles with intrinsic relation and semantic interpretation. Church singing as social communication, is the dynamic of personal acceptance of doctrinal elements, social experience in the form of knowledge about the surrounding world accumulated by Christian culture, principles and skills of community life, socially meaningful productive activity, and criteria of self-determination in a community. In turn, a person not only transmits Christian culture, but also creates and reproduces a tradition, varying it or inventing cultural innovations.