This video is going to look at the tritone. The subject of the tritone
came up when talking about Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un Faun. The tritone is this
unsettling chord which came to possess - or so we think - sinister, evil connotations
associated, perhaps, with the devil. And this gave rise to a lot commenting on our youtube
video about Debussy. Maurizio AMF said: Sorry, but I HATE when people just repeat the story
about the Middle Ages Demonic Tritonus. Really not true; used from time to time everywhere,
even in Gregorian chant. To take another comment from Wilhelm Orangenbaum, he says:
Don't further spread that myth, mate. The tritone was never banned. It was considered difficult to
sing in tune and therefore avoided most of the time - nothing more. There was no association
with the devil. The first time such an association was made was in the Baroque
era with the expression "Diabolus in musica". Now, both of those commenters are not incorrect
but do not tell the full or wholly true story about what the tritone really was. We should
clarify that we did not say that the tritone was actually banned in the medieval period.
The first thing to look at when answering these questions is to ask: what is a tritone?
A tritone is an interval - that is a space between notes - of three whole tones or six semitones.
So taking Debussy's piece, we have a tritone when the flute ascends and descends between the C sharp
and
the G.
There are three whole tones between them and that is our tritone.
So why does the tritone sound so weird and unsettling? Well,
that's because the tritone takes us out of the world of traditional tonality, by including
two notes that are essentially in alien keys to each other. We are juxtaposing notes from parallel
universes - in different musical languages to each other. This tips us into dissonance. So why
is everyone so update? Well, it is unnatural. It is restless. And, to sing a tritone in the context
of medieval ecclesiastical music, would have been pretty difficult. About the tritone being banned:
this is probably untrue. It is a myth that has been propagated by long-haired guitar wizards who
like to tell you that monks were excommunicated or punished from church for singing this prohibited
interval. However, there was certainly a culture of frequent avoidance, as Wilhelm talked about:
avoidance of this interval in medieval liturgical singing. And the first "prohibition" - for want
of a better word - of the tritone came with the development of the hexachordal system developed by
Guido of Arrezzo in the medieval period. And from the medieval times until the Renaissance,
the tritone was generally rejected for its tonal instability, and therefore people tried to avoid
it. But that is not to say that you can't find it in Gregorian chant. Just listen to Perotin, and
you will hear the tritone more than once. Whatever the case, what we can say is that by the Baroque
period and going into the Classical period, composers are becoming a lot more accepting of
the tritone, but they are a bit more circumscribed in the way that they use the tritone. What they do
is essentially acknowledge the tritone's existence - that it is unresolved - but it is always pushing
towards resolution. So the idea in Classical music is one of tension-release. And what I mean
by tension-release in the tonal system is that if I play this, it will make you really tense.
We all know where we want that to go. That's our tritone, and the way we resolve the tritone as
understood by the Classical-era musicians is by moving a step in contrary motion which would go.
How nice is THAT! We've got there. Tritone resolved in contrary motion. So when Julie
Andrews is prancing round Vienna singing Do-Re-Mi, we all want her to resolve to
that lovely tonic chord which takes us away from dissonant tritones to consonant tonality.
But what's all this stuff about the devil, and why are Maurizio and Wilhelm so angry with me
for bringing up tritones and the devil. There IS an idea that the avoidance of the tritone
was all about the fact that it was associated with the devil. Certainly from the Baroque era,
the tritone comes to be known as Diabolus in Musica - or the "devil in music".
The composer Telemann in 1733 talks about "Mi against Fa which the ancients called "Satan in
Music". But both of our commenters say there was no association with the devil in the Middle Ages.
I would contend that this is a really vexed question which would probably benefit from more
scholarship, because some do say that Diabolus in Musica was a late medieval concept, and there are
scholars like the great Denis Arnold who tell us that the associations with the devil were in fact
already inherent in medieval music itself from that time when Guido of Arrezo
designated the tritone a dangerous interval in his hexachordal system.
What we can say is that it is only in the late Classical and into the Romantic periods that
composers start to use the tritone freely and symbolically to represent the devil itself.
of harmonies, and use the tritone for the very purpose of exploiting its evil,
devilish connotations. You only need to consider a composer like Liszt, who starts his Dante
Sonata with a tritone to represent Hell. That is a perfect example of a freely-used tritone. But we
don't need to be so esoteric in the 20th and 21st Century to see the tritone infiltrating popular
music. Just think of the entirety of West Side Story which is essentially built on the tritone.
That's a tritone. Maria, I just met a girl named Maria! That's a tritone.
And we could say that the devil is on our TV screens
every single day: just think of every time we listen to
"The Simpsons".