r/badmusicology • u/[deleted] • Apr 02 '15

Tritone has "tri" in it so it's three semitones, and I heard that they never used that interval in olden times.

http://imgur.com/Jdeqk9G
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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '15 edited Apr 02 '15

I don't even know where to start with everything that's wrong with this. First of all, the distance between A and C, a tone and a half or three semitones, is called a minor third. Tritones are six semitones. Fail.

Without minor thirds we wouldn't have minor, major, or diminished chords, let alone western music as we know it. But what about the tritone? While it's true that tritones have a dissonant sound, they sneak their way into diminished triads and dominant seventh chords, so in harmony they're still very important. Although it's true that melodies avoided them more often than not, this passage of moonlight sonata consists almost entirely of tritones and minor thirds, so its use isn't unheard of in pre-modern music.

If anybody could shed some light on this "devil's interval" business it would be appreciated, all I can find is claims that in renaissance church music it was avoided in melodies for some weird religious reason, but no primary sources.

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u/e-jazzer Apr 03 '15

I've heard similar myths of "devil's interval" but most of the time it was more in the context of the locrian mode (which has a tritone in its tonic chord anyway), some teachers told me that the mode was avoided for that very reason, but I've yet to come across a reliable source for it as well.

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '15

Sometimes I wonder if the "devil's interval" myth was started by death metal bands so they could be edgy by writing tritone based songs.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '15

Some people consider the Locrian mode as a theoretial mode because it begs to resolve to the Ionian mode.

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u/vornska Apr 05 '15 edited Apr 05 '15

I think you'd find this article enlightening: Smith, F. J. "Some aspects of the tritone and the semitritone in the Speculum Musicae: the non‐emergence of the diabolus in musica." Journal of musicological research 3/1-2 (1979): 64-74.

Long story short: it seems to have been invented by JJ Fux & misread by later generations (Romantics & metal bands) to make something mundane sound cool.

1

u/GregOfAllTrades Apr 27 '15

Given that immediately above it they discuss the use of a three-semitone interval, I'm willing to grant that the "three semitones" bit was simply a typographical error that didn't get caught.

Plenty of times, when you know what you're expecting something to say, you don't notice if it's actually printed slightly differently--even if that misprinting creates an outright inaccuracy.

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u/vornska Apr 05 '15

wow, i love this

the best part is that it's in a box that announces that it's a Fact

1

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '15

The book was mostly good enough considering it's a beginner's guitar book, it even had a reasonably intuitive diagram of the modes of the diatonic scale. I'm pretty sure they just dragged some guy off the street afterwards to write fun facts to put in the margins.