The Great Myth of the Medieval Tritone Ban

the catholic church never banned the tritone this musical interval nobody thought that it would summon the devil in fact in this 13th century french christmas song you can very clearly hear a tritone in the second measure between e and b-flat the tune is called vivant omnes and was written by french composer perotin at the notre dame cathedral which let me check is uh yes it is in fact a catholic church and that is a tritone this interval was called the diabolus and musica which is this myth just won't die it is one of the longest running myths in music theory and it's kind of part of contemporary internet music culture you could have just summoned a freaking demon you got your memes you got your tick tocks you got jacob collier repeating this myth on his music theory interview that he did for wires that all people could say is this must be satan this is the devil speaking through music today i want to go deep so that this video is not just one long om actually and explore just how this myth came to be why today we think of it as the devil in music and why a thousand years ago they didn't let's get into it this video was brought to you by curiositystream and my streaming service nebula where you can watch a companion video to this one in jazz we like dissonance and and it's really interesting yes yes jacob summon me summon me through the power of jazz and the tritone it is through that sound i draw my power my corrupting influence over mortal man behold harmony most unjust oh god ugh double need some water part one tritones baby this bad boy right here is a mono cord invented in ancient samaria it's a device used for measuring musical notes based on dividing a string into equal proportions i don't have a mono chord but i got one better i got a bass guitar so if we take a string and we divide it into nine equal sections we're going to find a whole step or a tone at the first of the nine divisions this is the note a we can do that again measuring up from a to find another tone or whole step we can do that a third time to find the third tone the tritone we call that an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth today it's the note that's in between two perfect consonances the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth and historically that's been considered hard to sing in 335 bc the greek theorist aristoxinus said that the melodic distances of a fourth and fifth should never be altered otherwise they might sound out of tune likewise in the second century ad clionitis calls the melodic distance of a tritone a diaphony or two notes which don't blend together one theory that might explain the origin of the phrase diabolos and musica comes from looking at the roots of the ancient greek word diabolos itself dia meaning through and bolos to throw or to separate two notes which are thrown apart so diabolos might relate to the word diaphony which means the separation of pitches which is an early word for dissonance and in the middle ages the tritone was definitely considered a dissonance in a history of consonants and dissonance james tenney catalogs 30 separate musical treatises from the 9th century to the 16th century in europe and they all categorized the tritone as a dissonance arabic texts from the same time like the kitab al-musika al-kabir similarly appeal to greek music theory and they also call a tritone a dissonance but in all of these textbooks going back thousands of years there is simply no mention of the devil the satanic or the occult believe me people have tried to find it to no avail the tritone simply was considered a dissonance like any other spare your lies you know as well as i do that the tritone was especially to be avoided for it might summon me well okay true fine people did especially avoid the tritone but not because they thought it would summon the devil they just thought it was hard to sing you can hear that in examples of contemporary music like even flow by pearl jam for example listen to the verse melody the verse melody goes back and forth between f sharp and c a descending melodic tritone the third and the flat seven in the key of d that jump is difficult to nail perfectly you can kind of hear how waffly the pitch is on the low c made of concrete now no shade on eddie vedder if we auto tune this like contemporary music production might we would lose all the rich characteristics of the melody that doesn't change the fact that that might be hard to sing part two the carolingian super ultra hyper mega metadorian scale what what oh so stupid at a time the triton was seen as being of the devil by catholics and was banned wild to think that in the 9th century the tritone was banned so apparently the tritone interval was once banned in the church because it referenced the devil the music in the medieval church started out as chant plain chant sometimes you might have heard of it as gregorian chant you know the sound it's the sound from the halo soundtrack yeah that thing sometimes harmony was added which was a practice called organum where monks would sing the same melody down a perfect fourth in perfect fifth all in parallel fifths and fourths for what it's worth this is the halo theme if it was sung in organum sounds pretty sick there's a problem with this though that carolingian monks noticed when trying to harmonize this way the 9th century music treatise and harry potter spell musica encourages notes that the sounds at the interval of a fourth do not all without exception produce consonances throughout the whole series of tones so what does that mean so the monks would go and try and harmonize using what we would call the major scale today but they ran across this interval which just didn't seem to work as well it seemed to pull itself apart and to explain why that might be i'm afraid we need to use math let's go back to the mono chord acoustically what's happening when we divide the string into nine equal segments is that a is vibrating nine times for every eight times g is vibrating the open string it has a nine to eight ratio the same follows for the note b b has a 9 to 8 ratio back to a which in turn has a 9 to 8 ratio back to g the same thing for the tritone c sharp has a 9 to 8 ratio back to b has the 98 ratio back to a has a 98 ratio back to g which ends up being a very complicated acoustic relationship c sharp vibrates 729 times for every 512 times g vibrates you end up with this acoustic relationship which is complicated and might sound like a dissonance a rough sound a sound which doesn't harmonize well now that doesn't mean you can't harmonize with tritons if you want to run away with me i know a galaxy and i can take you for a ride but probably because of this acoustic relationship it's a lot harder too so if you just take the scale as is you'll eventually run into the tritone an interval which has that complicated acoustic relationship which sounds more separated than something like a perfect fourth which sounds a lot more rested there are 12 half steps in an octave and the medieval times playing two notes that were six half steps apart splatted fifth or a tritone was known as the devil's interval and banned in parts of europe one solution offered by the musica in caliadis is sometimes called the dasian scale the daisian scale is built from four tetrachords which go whole step half step whole step the first tetrachord is called the graves and then that pattern repeats up again a perfect fifth giving you the finales this repeats again up a fifth to give you the superioris and then again to give you the excellentes there are also two leftover notes on top aptly named the ramanantes this gives you an 18 note scale which doesn't repeat at the octave so in certain registers like the gravis you might sing a b flat but in other registers like the superioris you might see a b natural which is a little odd but the result of this is that you can harmonize in perfect fifths all the way up and down the scale without ever hitting a tritone so it's a little unclear as to whether or not the monks actually thought in terms of this dasian scale or whether or not it was just some kind of theoretical concept but what's really interesting is you can draw comparisons between it and jacob collier's super ultra hyper mega metal lydian scale you rise like [Music] you know yeah both it and the daisy in the scale are scales that do not repeat at the octave and instead are built on stacked tetrachords at the perfect fifth the main difference of course is that the dasian scale is over a thousand years old what has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done there is nothing new under the sun is there a thing of which it has been said see this is new it has already been done in the ages before us you see you quote scripture at me but that just proves my point they avoided the tritone because they knew its power you know in the middle ages the the tritone was identified as the music of the devil the church actually banned composers from using tritones in the middle ages church in hundreds of years ago forbid this interval the devil's note like in the old days you weren't allowed to use that note in the old days you weren't allowed to use that note part three the old days when you weren't allowed to use that note 12th century france saw rapid urbanization which brought with it the rise of the great cathedrals like of course the notre dame cathedral consecrated in paris in may of 1182 and like in any period of relative economic stability people like to get down the song topsy turvy from disney's the hunchback of notre dame depicts the french medieval tradition of the feast of fools a ruckus celebration where ecclesiastical tradition was thrown out the window this was usually held during the feast of the circumcision and people liked to get drunk upon seeing the bachanold degeneracy taking place in the new cathedral of notre dame the papal legate pierre de capuano got pissed and wrote back to the vatican of how many egregious and flagrant acts were committed frequently defiled not only by foul language but even by bloodshed later accounts of the parisian feast of fools told of how asses were led into the pulpit and sausages were consumed on the altar among other pernicious acts get your sausages get your sausages here who wants to commit some blasphemy to stem the tide of this degeneracy in 1198 the parisian bishop commissioned new music for the christmas masses the hope was that this would get the sausage-consuming masses more jazzed about the power of christ music's pretty good [Music] the tune from the beginning of this video was one of the pieces of music commissioned by the catholic church in this case for the christmas masses it's an example of four part organum you got four voices going at the same time and there's some pretty cool musical characteristics at play like for example the tenor voice the held voice stretches out each syllable of the text extremely long so it kind of almost sounds like a drone each syllable keeps going on for a very long time so there's a huge shift in color when the voices finally go on to the next syllable in the word [Music] the other voices then would sing short repetitive rhythms based on classic greek poetic meter these are what were called the rhythmic modes and organizing music this way creates a very bouncy vibrant feel at least compared to the earlier plane chant which was more austere and contemplative at the ends of phrases where syllables finally change the voices come together in a moment of what's called accented dissonance which is later resolved this goes to some vertical sonorities which sound pretty spicy honestly check this one out dang that's spicy there's also this one [Music] that's pretty hip pretty modern you could make some like 13th century lo-fi out of that one [Music] the music that was being made at notre dame in this period the so-called notre dame school of polyphony ended up being very popular and eventually composers started experimenting with new modes and new rhythms and new techniques in a style that would eventually become the ars nova the new art to contrast with the previous rs antiqua the old art the style that was based on plane chant and organa [Music] [Music] some of these experiments in the new art proved pretty weird like this stuff was really strange check out this magical from guillaume to the show [Music] [Applause] this tune straight up starts with the melodic tritone the supposed devil and music listen to how delicate it is [Music] it also has a very strange use of harmony and dissonance which might have been influenced by the actual physical spaces that this music was being performed in dissonant passages were intentionally written higher and with less voices compared to strong low consonant stacks of intervals that would reverberate with sympathetic vibrations in the cavernous churches hopefully invoking the power of god one of macho's masterworks was his notre dame massive 1365. check out the ensemble organum singing it it sounds so beautiful that added ornamentation which likely was from moorish influence just makes the whole polyphony sound so rich especially this passage check check this one out what the heck is that like wow that's spicy like what would you even call that chord you wouldn't call it a chord like that's a that's something that's something don't forget though that this new music this oz nova was my idea i corrupted the composers and convinced them to write licentious music to corrupt the souls of man so yeah the church started becoming very suspicious of these new composers with their r's nova and started pushing back in 1325 an official papal bull was declared denouncing the ars nova it's a document as well as harry potter spell known as the dhakta sanctorum patrum dr santorum or they sunder the melodies with pockets loosen them with desk ants trample them sometimes with three-part polyphonies and motets in the vernacular they despise the fundamentals kids these days with their ars nova am i right they fill their ears with impertinence and they relieve them not they imitate with gestures that which they have mustered by which gestures devotion that is to be desired is condemned and lasciviousness that is to be shunned is made manifest now the tritone is not mentioned anywhere here so this document maybe isn't the best example of the tritone being banned by the catholic church but there is an interesting phrase here lasciviousness that is to be shunned maybe the tritone didn't conjure images of the devil and the occult maybe the tritone was just too sexy for the church after all there's this long-standing belief in europe that music can influence the base emotions and that can be dangerous demonic chords oh that was way back in the renaissance music when the church banned the use of the augmented fourth tritone for the fascination of evil thoughts there is this ancient greek idea of modal affectations and how different modes might influence different emotions some of them make men sad and grave like the so-called mixolydian kind of like my ex others enfeeble the mind like the relaxed modes another again produces a moderate or settled temper which appears to be the peculiar effect of the dorian and the phrygian inspires enthusiasm the feeling that music had a deep sway over emotion continued throughout the middle ages improper music might drive people to lustful and licentious madness the perfect tritone aka the devil's interval once banned by the church but ever present in the minor 7th chord anyway can't stop the tritone triton was literally banned for a period of time in the catholic church because they associated its dissonance with satanism fascinating the effect music can have on people for real inguido dorezzo's 1099 treatise and harry potter spell micrologus he writes one would be so inflamed to a fleshy lust through the sweetness of zether playing that he wishes to break into the chamber of a maiden but soon when the zether changes its sensual manner then driven by contrition he is ashamed of himself music is one of the fairest and most glorious gifts of god to which satan is a bitter enemy for it removes from the heart the weight of sorrow and the fascination of evil thoughts foolish martin luther you think that you can stop me i have at my arsenal certain modes that will corrupt even the purest among you here's the thing though in the middle ages there isn't any mention of any specific mode or interval that might drive this madness the treatises don't really have any ethical or pathological descriptions of dissonances and tritones and things like that instead the descriptions seem more physiological the nature of a tritone as a dissonance is hostile to nature and is annoying and irritating to human hearing tritones are bad in the same way that getting hit in the head is bad it hurts they don't summon the devil no they just kind of suck to listen to you if you want to run away with me i know a galaxy and i can take you for a ride in 1555 nicolo vengentino seems to be the first person to say anything about the affect of the tritone how it feels and what it does vincentino says that the tritone is quote vivacious and forceful and ascent and funerial and sad and decent the theme to the simpsons features an ascending melodic tritone and it seems to have the same affect that vincentino described almost 500 years earlier it is vivacious and forceful there is no like devilishness coming through at all here maria from west side story also features a very vivacious and forceful ascending melodic tritone it's a yearning melody there's a lot of hope there there's a lot of joy in it [Music] the motif used in the intro themes to one division play on this trope of the vivacious fun and exciting use of the ascending melodic tritone the context of the tritone and these modern examples seems to be more along the lines of how vincentino was thinking of using tritones in his music less is a devilish invocation and more something triumphant and so we might imagine a different history where we're not teaching the tritone as the devil in music but instead we're teaching it as the vivacious in music it's the playful interval but instead today we have a very different shared cultural connection to the sound it's this [Applause] part five diabolos and musica black sabbath by the band black sabbath has all the accoutrements of the occult lyrics the visual language everything screams diabolos and musica [Music] [Applause] the guitar riff makes heavy use of a descending tritone from f sharp to c in a context that sounds funerial and sad and desolate what's interesting here though is exactly where black sabbath got the idea for this musical language of the tritone i was a medium-sized fan of holt the planet suite particularly mars [Music] mars bringer of war is the first movement of gustav holtz the planets suite it's based around a thunderous crashing tritone its musical context is more like warlike and violent rather than devilish but you know it's it's the right vibe for metal we were rehearsing and i was going trying to play mars and then the next day tony went in i meant [Music] and that's the black sabbath came about metal musicians very often point to this song and its use of the tritone as being the birth of heavy metal music black sabbath their their title song you know black sabbath is totally working the diminished fifth song metal musicians also tend to have the habit of spreading the myth that the tritone was banned in the middle ages because as filmmaker sam dunn explains and meddle a headbanger's journey there's an ongoing battle in heavy metal to be more evil than the band that came before you any piece of occult lore from history eventually gets wrapped up and assimilated into the branding of metal music at least in an attempt to sound more evil than the last band if there's something from history called the devil in music diabolos and musica of course it's going to be part of metal music why wouldn't it be but the problem is that the phrase diabolos in musica the devil in music as we've seen never occurs in the middle ages the church never banned it where is this coming from tritone augmented forth was banned in churches in the middle ages thought to be demonic the very first example of the tritone being referred to as the devil in music diabolos and musica comes in 1725 in gratis odd parnassum a music treatise by johann the phrase is mikanthra es dibolos and musica me against fa is the devil in music if we were to take our modern understanding of me and pha that doesn't really make sense because me is the third degree of the scale and phi is the fourth degree of the scale if you play them both together that's a minor second which is a dissonance but not a tritone so where are we getting this the tritone is the devil and music business on the middle ages and the renaissance there was a system of using hexachords six note groupings which followed the pattern whole step holds a half step whole step whole step going from pha the fourth degree in one of the commonly used hexachords to me and another hexachord might result in a tritone which is hard to sing it's a devil of a thing to sing within this hexachord system there is the practice of musica ficta where singers would slightly alter melodies with chromaticism in order to avoid the tritone to avoid me contra i really recommend watching early music sources video on solmization and the guidonian hand if you're at all interested in learning more about this hexachord system it's a fantastic channel i learn a lot when watching it anyway this technical rule me against pha is the source of all of the devil imagery which is really funny because the phrase could have just as easily been man tritones are just a pain to sing and then 300 years later tritones represent pain and agony in music fun fact the tritone was known in the christian faith as diabolos and musica and was banned from services the metaphor somehow changed into a literal interpretation of the phrase diabolos and musica 19th century composers who are familiar with this phrase diabolos and musica couldn't resist the opportunity to take this imagery and write music around a tritone as kind of like an in-joke that also served to evoke powerful emotions it's through this process the tritones became a marker of death and destruction like in camille sanchez dance macabre it sounds aggressive to me and especially when you name the piece of music dance macabre you're going to make that connection between the tritone and death gustav holtz was well aware of this meaning of the tritone when he wrote mars bringer of war this is of course the inflection point when it comes to metal music and metal musicians understanding of diabolos and music during the 16th 17th century the vatican outlawed it because they called it the movement of the devil because the imagery is powerful it is just irresistible not to take it literally especially if you're an arms race against your fellow metal heads creating an imagined past where the tritone is banned by the church in an attempt to sound subversive in the present the more that you say that the tritone was banned in the past the more it seems that you're going against convention now even if that past never happened and was largely an invention of 19th century composers playing off of a technical rule that they learned when they were first composing and so that 19th century aesthetic of the demonic tritone is repeated in the 20th century and the 21st century and the past understanding of the tritone is largely forgotten literally three notes the devil's tritone once banned by the church part six xerox of xerox all right to recap this is how we got here today one early medieval singers didn't like singing tritones so they invented the daisian scale two later 14th ars nova composers like michoa threw a bunch of tritones here and there anyway just cause they sounded cool but most people still avoided them three a cutesy saying about how the sound is a pain to sing is coined probably in the 18th century four 19th century composers wrote music that was based on a cheeky literal reading of the saying and high drama ensues five metal music was born very directly from this 19th century retelling of the cutesy saying diabolos and musica 6. based on metal musicians desire to seem more evil than the next we now get the myth that the tritone was banned by the catholic church in the middle ages you can kind of see how this came about how our historical understanding of this sound has been like a xerox of a xerox it's been jpegged into utter oblivion and our own understanding of the past is completely unrelated to the experiences of those who lived it history in effect is like this infinite game of telephone it almost doesn't even matter what interval the devil in music is supposed to be just that there was an interval that was banned there was this dissonant interval that everybody was afraid of it was the it was the it sounds like a seventh it it sounds terrible it was actually called the devil in music quick music theory lesson there for you but it sounds dissonant it doesn't sound correct so you know it doesn't really matter if the church banned the tritone or not in the middle ages because that's what people believe and if enough people believe it it becomes the truth if something just keeps getting repeated over and over again it bores into people's minds and that becomes the new way of looking at the world okay yeah i know i know where you're going with this yeah okay great say it say it repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizers repetition legitimizes repetition legitimizes the opening of jimi hendrix's purple haze uses a tritone that was banned by the catholic church in that era because the sound was perceived repetition legitimizes it man the devil's chord the devil's interval and if you live long enough it go there to hung you for playing that repetition legitimately he shows me a chord progression called the tritone also known as the devil's interval repetition legitimizes the tritone classified as six semitones three tones is also nicknamed is being taught in western history classes as homework so it's not like this is some forbidden ancient knowledge that was forgotten so i think it's more like the myth is coming from a place where we're wanting to feel superior to people in the past like we're more fully formed human beings who have a better understanding of the world around us and we aren't superstitious like they were i think that in the middle ages people who were ignorant and scared when they heard something like that and felt that reaction inside their body went oh here come the devil repetition legitimizes the tritone is somewhat famous or infamous among musicians because centuries it seems to me that in popular culture the general understanding the general vibe of when western classical music kind of began is in or around the 18th century or so this perhaps not coincidentally coincides with the age of enlightenment in europe since the enlightenment in the west science seems to have inexorably marched forward from the benighted past and so for some people it must follow that music and art have also been in a constant state of development getting more and more refined since we have technology now that we didn't have before in the past so too it must follow that we have musical technology that we didn't have before in the past we know now that tritones are in fact good and cool and they can be used in jazz music in jazz we like dissonance and and it's really interesting so at some point in the primitive past they must have been bad it was such a dissonant sound with no context that all people could say it was this must be satan this this is the devil speaking through music we like dissonant things now so there must be a higher musical technology at play than the primitive past where people were scared of clashing musical sounds because it might invoke the devil diabolos and musica which is you know absolutely ridiculous and that guillaume de macho madrigal the harmony is very strange it sounds like nothing that exists in pop music today and that was the pop music of the time it sounds like i don't know it sounds super cool [Applause] it's still the harmony like it's very jazz honestly pretty cool you can hear me talk a lot more about the weird harmony that you hear in this magical in the companion piece to this video which is available exclusively over on nebula my streaming service where you can watch a bunch of additional bonus content not only from this channel but also from many of your favorite educational content creators like wendover productions mary spender charles cornell real engineering 12 tone and many many more it's a great way to watch and discover quality content ad-free as well as support your favorite youtube creators and also support this channel you know the costume budgets and the sausage budgets sometimes are you know quite prohibitive here nebula is supported by another fantastic streaming service curiosity stream the go-to source on the internet for the very best documentaries with thousands of titles to choose from including inside a virtuoso's brain a fascinating look at the neuroscience of musical performance if you're interested in this click the link in the description or go to curiositystream.comadamnealy you'll not only get some of the amazing documentaries over on curiosity stream but also a subscription to nebula for free and what's more is that for a limited time you'll get access to both curiosity stream and nebula for just 14.79 a year a 26 discount or less than a dollar 25 a month which is just an insanely good deal for subscription service two subscription services two of them if you click the link in the description you're not only supporting this channel but all the other amazing educational content creators over on nebula as we build a platform that aims to engage the world in a more meaningful way and hopefully do things like you know debunk the myth that the tritone was banned

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,171,373

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: 3MhwGnq4N9o

Length: 32min 38sec (1958 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Peterowsky]

TIL Black Sabbath popularized the idea that the tritone was associated with evil.

[u/CloudAwareness]

Jazz Musicians in the 50’s and 60’s made tritones popular (especially Miles Davis). Flat fives or sharp elevens, aka The Blue Note.

[u/Scottland83]

Thank you! And Hippasus was most probably not drowned for proving that the square root of two is irrational. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus#Irrational_numbers

[u/DaddyBobMN]

TIL there was a myth that the Catholic Church banned the tritone, and this is coming from a fan of metal music who was raised by Catholics.

[u/darkbee83]

It does sound unsettling, though, and therefor quite metal.

[u/RetroMetroShow]

Hendrix’s Purple Haze intro started with a tritone since acid trips can be evil and it came out a few years before Black Sabbath

[u/lorum_ipsum_dolor]

Franz Liszt would like to have word with you regarding his "Dante Sonata".

[u/pufballcat]

Unless it’s a myth that Sabbath started the myth

[u/doctor-rumack]

The opening bars of Rush's YYZ are a tritone interval. That song is close to perfect.