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Edward's use of the term 'affections, particularly his use of the phrase 'tendency to move our affections' needs to be understood carefully. The doctrine of the affections, a common musical theory in the Baroque period, embraced the belief that music is capable of arousing a variety of specific emotions within a listener. Baroque theorists believed that composers could create an involuntary response in their audience. Hence, musical ideas (e.g. keys, intervals, phrase structures) became linked to specific feelings, moods and emotions and this had consequent effects on musical structures, musical development, etc. Perhaps the most famous of these was the tritone, the devil's interval, which had to be avoided at all costs by Renaissance and early Baroque composers.

Of course, many of these ideas are controversial and highly critiqued in modern musicology. Modernist notions of music being a self-contained entity which one can listen to in a purist sense has been entirely credited by postmodernist writers and theorists who place musical expression in a much wider cultural and social milieu. We bring as much with us to the music as the music brings to us.

Approaching music as a single entity, divorced from our wider lived experiences, is dangerous. It can lead to an emasculation of music's power and potential as a wonderful artform given for religious expression by divorcing it from our wider lives. We need to reconsider the role and function of music in our churches and get beyond some of these older theories and related practices. I wonder what it would sound like?