Why is scary music so weird?

I heard it was a scary deal…

Let’s face it. When it comes to creating a creepy Halloween atmosphere, the modern pop canon has nothing to work with. Fortunately, the old Europeans liked their music much cooler than “Thriller”.

In the 19th century, composers such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner cracked the code of creepiness. The sonic scare they started involved two key ingredients that horror movies and metal bands still use today: a forbidden sequence of notes known as “Satan in Music” and a spooky little chant that Gregorian monks they sang it about the apocalypse.

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Brief history

A taboo song

In the Middle Ages, most Western music was written for the praise of God and was therefore assumed to sound pleasing. For the songwriters, this wasn’t a huge constraint. Take a C major scale – that is, just the white piano keys – pull out any combination of two notes and you’ll find a harmony of holy ghost quality.

Except for one.

Played in sequence or together, the interval between notes F and B clash in a way that feels choppy, unnatural and foreboding. (If you don’t have a keyboard handy, think of the first two notes of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” or Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”—or American police sirens.) It’s this interval that people in the Dark Ages and I call it rebirth diabolus in music— “Satan in Music.” Modern music theorists know it as the tritone (as well as a diminished fifth or augmented fourth), although it is also called the devil’s interval or the devil’s triad.

This demonic combo was taboo in medieval times, although there is no historical evidence for the popular claim that it was banned outright. But it was saved for the worst musical circumstances, for example depicting the devil or the crucifixion.

Explain it like I’m 5 years old!

Why is the newt so strange?

“The reason it’s unsettling is that it’s ambiguous, unresolved,” says Gerald Moshell, a former music professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. said NPR. “You don’t know where it’s going to end up, but it can’t stop where it is.” If you slightly change one of the two notes, the dissonance turns into harmony. What’s really happening when we hear dissonance has to do with the relationship between frequencies—the two heights of the devil range create a much more complicated frequency relationship than other ranges and are therefore much harder for the ear to reconcile human. (For example, using our C major example, the frequency ratio of C to G is 3:2, while for the tritone, it is 45:32, according to Classical FM.)

Pop quiz

Which popular TV sitcom begins its opening theme song with a newt?

A. The Simpsons

B. The Big Bang Theory

C. Will & Grace

d. How i met your mother

Listen, if you’re scared of how your memory is failing you, don’t worry—the answer is at the bottom.

Pop pioneers

How the devil range went mainstream

Even in the Baroque and Classical eras, as the influence of the Catholic Church on culture faded, composers continued to avoid the devil’s interval. In strange passages where tritones did appear, their use was technical: to create—and quickly resolve—tension.

Then suddenly, at the dawn of classical music’s romantic era, there he was, in Act 2 of Beethoven’s 1805 opera. Fidelio. As the scene opens in a dungeon, kettle drums rumble menacingly – tuned to the diabolical range. (They appear around 1:20 in this recording.) Something akin to obsession ensued as composers used newts to probe the darker corners of nature and humanity.

Catchy songs

Enter the day of wrath

Romantic composers also received plenty of condemnation from another fragment of medieval Roman Catholic music: the haunting 13th-century Gregorian chant. Irae diesor “Day of Wrath.” Creepmeister extraordinaire Hector Berlioz, a French composer, gets credit for his uncanny discovery in 1830 Fantastic Symphony.

It’s about an artist who, thinking he’s rejected by a woman he’s chasing, tries to overdose on opium. Instead, he hallucinates that he kills the woman, is beheaded, and witnesses his funeral by turning into a witches’ sabbath. The Irae dies appears during the final movement, in a run with dancing witches, a bubbling cauldron and a fiendish orgy (in this recordingat about 3:25).

But the work was not entirely fantastic. Berlioz himself was a stalkerand some historians believe that he composed it while high on opium. It also hatched pounding— and thankfully aborted — plans to kill his ex-fiancée.

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Newts today

Either in a Jameson whiskey ad or the creepiest one ever episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayeryou’ve almost certainly heard “Danse macabre” before. The Irae dies it is also ubiquitous as a terror trope. Stanley Kubrick was so obsessed with music that he supposedly requested its use for the opening music of The shine. It also features in horror classics such as The Exorcist and Poltergeist.

Among heavy metal bands, the devil’s range is long enjoyed something approaching cult status. Slayer, for example, named their 1998 album Diabolus in Music. Perhaps the most famous shout-out to his sinister unholy is the opening of Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath.” But other genres have broadened its appeal. In the first notes of the song “Maria”, from West Side Storycomposer Leonard Bernstein used a tritone to create a strange tension that then resolves itself. Because of the unique ambiguity of the tritone, it is also ubiquitous in jazz chords.

Its wider popularity today probably has something to do with the fact that Death and the devil have lost some of their power to terrify in the last 150 years. But in music written to explore those fears, that power endures.

sounding

What is your favorite use of the devil range?

• Keep it real with “Danse Macabre”
• Keeping it real with “Cold Beverage” by G. Love
• I’m more of a “Mary” type of person.

Give us something to jump to… tell us your answer!

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Today’s email is one from the archives. It was written by Gwynn Guilfordedited by Jessanne Collinsand produced by Luiz Romero. Updates were made by Morgan Haefner.

The correct answer to the pop quiz is A., The Simpsons.