Abstract
“Because simultaneous attention to words and music allows the music to organize the text and reveal the point which its words are being used to make, we are proposing that what we call a hymn is the resultant meaning of the sounds-as-words and the sounds-as-music. The musical-verbal phenomenon that performs a function in the church's worship is not the verbal meaning and the musical structure as two parallel or added quantities. It is the meaning that results from the fact that the same sounds articulate both; both are heard simultaneously, and the one reveals the meaning of the other.”
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