Spooky music: Forbidden chord + apocalyptic ditty = 😱♫🔥

Let’s face it. When it comes to creating a creepy Halloween atmosphere, the modern pop canon doesn’t have much to work with. Fortunately, ye olde Europeans liked their music a lot more chilling than “Thriller.” During the 19th century, composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner cracked the code of creepiness. The sonic dread they pioneered 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 ditty that Gregorian monks sang about the apocalypse. ♫ Cue unsettling chord.♫ 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( Sponsored by [Quartz Obsession] Spooky music October 24, 2018 I heard there was a scary chord... --------------------------------------------------------------- Let’s face it. When it comes to creating a creepy Halloween atmosphere, the modern pop canon doesn’t have much to work with. Fortunately, ye olde Europeans liked their music a lot more chilling than “Thriller.” During the 19th century, composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner cracked the code of creepiness. The sonic dread they pioneered 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 ditty that Gregorian monks sang about the apocalypse. ♫ Cue unsettling chord.♫ 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( AP Photo/Michael Probst Brief history A taboo tune --------------------------------------------------------------- In the Middle Ages, most Western music was written in praise of God, and was therefore supposed to sound pleasant. For composers, that wasn’t a huge constraint. Take a C major scale—i.e. just the white keys on the piano—plunk out any two-note combination, and you’ll find a holy ghost-grade harmony. Except one. Played in sequence or together, the interval between the notes [F and B]( clash in a way that feels twitchy, 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 folks in the dark ages and the Renaissance called diablous in musica—“Satan in music.” Modern music theorists know it as the tritone (as well as a diminished fifth, or an augmented fourth), though it’s also called the devil’s interval or the devil’s triad. This demonic combo was taboo in medieval times, though there’s no historical evidence for the popular claim that it was banned outright. But it was saved for the gravest of musical circumstances, like [portraying the devil or the crucifixion](. Explain it like I'm 5! Why is the tritone so freaky? --------------------------------------------------------------- “The reason it’s unsettling is that it’s ambiguous, unresolved,” Gerald Moshell, music professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, [told NPR](. “You don’t know where it’ll go, but it can’t stop where it is.” If you change one of the two notes just slightly, the dissonance turns to harmony. What’s really happening when we hear dissonance has to do with the relationship between frequencies—the two pitches of the devil’s interval create a much more complicated ratio of frequencies than other intervals, and are therefore much harder for the human ear to reconcile. (For instance, using our C major example, the frequency ratio of C to G is 3:2, while for the tritone, it’s 45:32, [according to Classical FM]( Sponsored by JPMorgan Chase & Co. It’s time to rethink the one-on-one mentorship. --------------------------------------------------------------- Today’s business environment demands mentorships that can keep up with its complexity and pace of change.[Read about some of the most compelling alternatives.]( Giphy Pop quiz Which popular TV sitcom begins its opening theme song with a tritone? How I Met Your MotherThe SimpsonsThe Big Bang TheoryWill and Grace Correct. Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. Giphy Pop pioneers How the devil's interval went mainstream --------------------------------------------------------------- Even during the Baroque and Classical eras, as the Catholic Church’s influence over culture faded, composers continued the eschew the devil’s interval. In the [odd passages]( where tritones appeared, their use was technical: to create—and quickly resolve—tension. Then suddenly, at the dawn of the Romantic era of classical music, there it is, in Act 2 of Beethoven’s 1805 opera Fidelio. As the scene opens in a dungeon, the kettle drums rumble menacingly—tuned in the devil’s interval. (They appear at around 1:20 in [this recording]( Something akin to obsession followed, as composers used tritones to probe the darker corners of nature and humanity. [Our essential Devil’s Interval/Dies Irae playlist]( Catchy ditties Enter the day of wrath --------------------------------------------------------------- Romantic composers also got a lot of doom out of another bit of medieval Roman Catholic music: the haunting 13th-century Gregorian chant [Dies Irae]( or “Day of Wrath.” Creepmeister extraordinaire Hector Berlioz, a French composer, gets credit for the blood-curdling breakthrough in his freaky 1830 Symphonie Fantastique. It’s about an artist who, believing himself rejected by a woman he’s stalking, tries to overdose on opium. Instead, he hallucinates that he kills the woman, is beheaded, and witnesses his funeral devolve into a witches’ sabbath. The Dies Irae comes in during the final movement, in a fugue with dancing witches, a bubbling cauldron, and a diabolical orgy (in [this recording]( at about 3:25). But the work was not entirely fantastique. Berlioz himself was a [stalker]( and some historians think he composed it while high on opium. He also hatched a [bumbling]( thankfully abortive—plan to murder his former fiancée. I'm bad, I'm worldwide Everything "Dies," baby --------------------------------------------------------------- Hungarian Franz Liszt attended the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, then ran with the Dies Irae. A pioneer of infernally tricky piano pieces, Liszt was obsessed with the devil, death, and the like, and used both the tune and tritones in “Dante Sonata,” the first “Mephisto Waltz,” “Totentanz,” and others. More Romantics fell in love with the Dies Irae: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, and dozens of others. Russian great Sergei Rachmaninoff takes the cake for the most frequent use—for example, in his dirge-like Isle of the Dead and “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini.” Rachmaninoff’s countryman Modest Mussorgsky was a fan too. In his work, “Songs and Dances of Death,” the Dies Irae appears in a song about a drunken farmer who loses his way in a snowstorm and dances with Death as he fatally freezes. The melody also abounds in [Night on Bald Mountain]( the composer’s tone poem about [Chernobog]( the “black god” from Slavic myth who may or may not be Satan. (You may [recognize it]( from Disney’s trip-tastic Fantasia.) And just before Chernobog awakens, the trombones punch out a menacing line of tritones. Case study The Dance of Death --------------------------------------------------------------- The “Dance of Death” refers to a medieval allegory in which the dead rise to dance with the living to remind them of their mortality—a popular subject of frescoes and cemetery murals across Europe. The French dressed as corpses at village fairs and court parties—a tradition that may have given rise to Halloween costumes. French superstition held that at midnight on All Hallow’s Eve, the forerunner of modern Halloween, Death begins the danse. Naturally, the most enduring musical version—and the biggest Halloween hit—of the Romantic era came from a Frenchman: Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1872 tone poem “Danse macabre,” which exploits the double whammy of tritones and the Dies Irae The piece begins with 12 plucks of a harp string depicting the tolling of midnight. Then in comes the devil’s interval—raw, savage slashes on a solo violin that signifies Death, sometimes described as Death playing the violin. The Dies Irae appears about halfway through; Saint-Saëns’s eerie [major-key rendering]( makes the motif sound less foreboding than grotesque. Other innovations of aural horror abound, likea xylophone emulating the cracking of bones. When the oboe sounds the crowing of the rooster, the dead retreat, and the whole ghoulish thing ends. Take me down this 🐰 hole The [classic musical motif]( that announces the arrival of a villain or a generally foreboding moment is called Mysterioso Pizzicato. [According to Atlas Obscura]( it “has a fittingly roguish backstory.” How we 😱now Tritones of today --------------------------------------------------------------- Whether in a Jameson’s whiskey ad or in the creepiest-ever [episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer]( you’ve almost certainly heard “Danse macabre” before. The Dies Irae is also ubiquitous as a go-to terror trope. So obsessed with the melody was Stanley Kubrick that he [supposedly demanded its use]( for the opening music of The Shining. It also figures into horror classics like The Exorcist and Poltergeist. Among heavy metal bands, the devil’s interval has long [enjoyed something approaching cult status](. Slayer, for instance, named its 1998 album Diabolus in Musica. Perhaps the most famous paean to its unholy eeriness 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 Story, composer Leonard Bernstein used a tritone to create a weird tension that then resolves. Thanks to the tritone’s unique ambiguity, it’s also ubiquitous in jazz chords. Its wider popularity these days probably has something to do with the fact that Death and the devil have lost some of their power to terrify over the last 150 years. But in the music written to explore those fears, that power endures. Giphy Poll What's your favorite use of the devil's interval? [Click here to vote]( Keeping it real with "Danse Macabre"Keeping it real with G. Love's "Cold Beverage"More of a "Maria" type of person 💬 Let's talk! In yesterday’s poll about [Dr. Bronner’s]( 44% of you said you’ve used the 18-in-1 soap “just a couple ways.” 📧 Adam writes: “I have also used Dr. Bronner’s peppermint as toothpaste. 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