You are listening to the opening phrases of
Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, or the "Dance of Death."
Based upon a late medieval moral allegory on the universal nature of mortality
This tone poem paints a picture of death, summoning spirits to remind humanity just how frail we truly are.
The Danse Macabre begins with a violinist violently sawing out an A and E flat (Eb)
which form the interval the "Tritone," an interval that we know today by its Latin moniker
diabolus en musica, or the devil in music.
This is the same interval that opens Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.
A similar raw an aggressive invocation to the spirits.
The Tritone, also known as the diminished fifth or augmented fourth
is named as such because it spans three whole tone intervals.
or Tri-tone
It neatly divides the octave into two equal parts, but it's an unstable sound
The tritone is an important engine of the cycle of "tension" and "release"
fundamental to our system of tonal harmony.
Because of how dissonant it is
it sets up expectations of resolution.
But what if that resolution never came?
The phrase "diabolus en musica" seems to harken back to the middle ages
before the development of our system of tonal harmony.
Because of how dissonant and unresolved the tritone was
church officials were afraid that if monks were to sing it, the devil himself would appear.
It was explicitly banned, and anyone who dared to sing was sen... sen... sen...
Wait a second!
Play that background music again.
That's a tritone that those monks are singing.
How can that be?
I mean, are you sure that they're singing that right?
Because I've always heard that the tritone was banned in the middle ages because it was the "devil in music."
Just listen to Alex Webster of Cannibal Corpse explain it:
Alex: "Tritone, that's the devil's note, like in the old days you weren't allowed to use that note."
The tritone was not banned in the middle ages
There simply is no evidence to suggest that it ever was.
This is true despite the fact that that bit of misinformation is repeated over and over on the internet:
"Two notes that was *banned* by the Catholic Church"
"Tritone was banned by the Catholic Church"
"According to scholars it was at one point outlawed."
"This specific interval was banned"
"The Devil's Interval and was banned in some cases."
We do, however, have plenty of evidence
to show that the tritone *was* used, albeit, fairly rarely.
The music that we were just to was written by the great medieval composer
Perotin, and it contains several tritones.
Fourteenth century music theorists thought the tritone was difficult to sing
and dissonant, but could be used effectively in certain contexts.
In his "Speculum Musicae," Jacobas of Leige wrote:
The earliest source that we have of the phrase "diabolus en musica"
comes four hundred years after medieval practice.
It's found in the 18th century counterpoint textbook known as
the "Gradus ad parnassum" by Johann Fux.
The actual phrase was a little bit more technical and went like this:
This means that "mi," the third note of the scale, against "fa" the fourth note of the scale
is the "devil in music."
This... isn't even the right interval.
E against F form a minor second.
Not a tritone
The full Latin phrase makes a little bit more sense in the context of
something called "Hexachords," or the first 6 notes of the major scale.
In medieval music, vocal parts were split up into three separate hexachords.
The natural hexachord was built on C.
The soft hexachord was built on F.
And the hard hexachord was built on G.
So "mi" from the natural hexachord can create a tritone with "fa" from the soft hexachord.
And "fa" from the natural hexachord can create a tritone with "mi" from the hard hexachord.
"Mi" from the hard hexachord was especially crunchy against "fa" from the soft hexachord.
All of these were in general just hard to sing in tune
so were avoided if at all possible.
"Mi contra fa es diabolus en musica" is an aphorism
similar to "i before e except after c."
It is a practical, technical rule and not a warning against the devil.
Well if it wasn't banned in the middle ages because it sounded evil
then why does it sound... so... evil? To me?
Well it's because of a fascinating thing that linguists call "Semantic Shift."
In language the meanings of words can change over time
often with more and more negative connotation.
"Demagogue" used to simply mean "popular leader."
"Awful" simply meant "inspiring awe."
A similar thing happened with the tritone.
19th century romantic composers studied the Gradus ad Parnassum
and took the phrase "diabolus en musica" quite literally.
They would then go on to create very sinister music based upon the tritones.
Such as the opening to the Dante Sonata by Liszt
depicting Dante's decent into Hell.
The Semantic Shift to an evil tritone intensified a century later
when metal bands started experimenting with tritone-laden riffs in songs like
Metallica's "Enter Sandman"
Slayer's aptly named album "Diabolus en Musica"
and my personal favorite:
the song "Black Sabbath" on the album "Black Sabbath" by the band, Black Sabbath.
Even if it didn't mean it at all in the middle ages,
the tritone has been socially codified to mean "evil" over the past two centuries.
But is there anything, like, inherently evil about the tritone?
That would make us feel that way?
Like... scientifically... or something?
Well... I mean it's dissonant and unstable
It's used in police sirens because of its grating quality.
But I'm note really sure if it's "evil."
I mean, in our equal tempered system of tuning, the tritone's pitch relationship back to the root is
the square root of 2 to 1
which, I guess, kinda... feels... evil... right?
It is certainly unstable compared to the sound of a just intonated perfect fifth
which has the ratio of 3:2
In general the human ear prefers the sound of simpler ratios to more complex ones.
A ratio like the square root of 2 to 1
will sound dissonant because our ears can't reconcile those two frequencies very easily.
We generally will then assign that dissonance a cultural connotation later.
Like, say, the dissonance of a tritone being the devil in music.
But there are plenty of more contexts for the tritone beyond this.
It can be yearning and hopeful
like the first melodic interval to the song "Maria" from West Side Story.
Or it can be mischievous and playful like in the theme to "The Simpsons."
A tritone can also be... well... boring.
French absurdist composer Erik Satie
created a piece known as Vexations
which consisted of unresolved tritones
and a full performance traditionally takes over 24 hours to complete.
It certainly does evoke boredom in music, something that Satie often sought to achieve.
The tritone can also be affirming and soulful
Blues exploits the subtle tension of the unresolved tritone
as an intrinsic sound of the music.
Blues chord progressions are built on dominant seventh (V7) chords
which contain a tritone between the third degree and the lowered seventh degree.
Which never gets resolved the same way that it does in classical tonal harmony.
The cultural folklore of the blues really can't get away from devil myths
though, like the classic story of Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads
to sell his soul in exchange for the ability to play guitar.
This is similar to the story of 18th century composer and violinist
Giuseppe Tartini, who wrote a piece of music known as the "Devil's Trills Sonata"
after he had a dream where he sold his sold his soul to the devil
Tartini, the Devil, and the Blues are even more closely related to this because of how
Tartini liked to tune his tritones
In his writings, he advocated the use of something called the "Lesser Septimal Tritone"
A tuning of the tritone based upon a simpler ratio of 7:5.
Since the equal-tempered tritone is built upon the irrational ratio of the square root of 2 to 1
it sounds dissonant.
But tuning it a little bit lower to the ratio of 7:5 makes it sound a little bit less rough.
You can think of this ratio of 7:5
as the distance between the seventh harmonic of the harmonic series to the fifth harmonic of the harmonic series.
Or roughly equivalent to the distance between the major third and flat seven
of the dominant seven chords (V7) used in blues harmony.
Blues singers will often use the 7:5 lesser septimal tritone
as a means of altering the scale in a classical alteration known as the Blue Note.
So, what we've learned is that, depending on context, the tritone can assume a variety of meanings beyond
just devilishness.
In his book "The Craft of Musical Composition,"
the composer and theorist Paul Hindemith wrote:
In his book "20th Century Harmony," composer Vincent Persichetti put it a lot more succinctly:
The tritone is restless.
I kinda like this characterization because it encompasses
all the different moods that we've associated with the tritone in this video.
The cultural trope of the tritone being the "devil in music"
is a tempting one for a young musician to adopt.
But this is so much more cultural and musical history
to this interval and so much more left to be explored.
What will you do with the tritone?
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
My name is Adam Neely
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BASS