The Tritone

While most of the people around the world perceive and associate Heavy Metal music with the devil and his evil and cruel intentions, most of the people don’t know the origin of the cause and why this is so misunderstood and  heavy metal is often considered as devilish music. Although some part of it may be true, but not everything. And today I would like to shed light on  this music and its origin.

This type of haunting music is mostly found in horror movies- the frightening organ sound before the demon makes an appearance, one can find such music had been originated in the 1700s and 1800s. Diabolus in musica was one of the most haunting pieces in music. It was believed to have some dangerous and haunting music intervals. Similar music can be found to be developed in the Renaissance period as well.

Let’s now go to the 1800s, where the legends like Beethoven Wagner were composing music. One can surely understand that nothing but classical music was known to people. Out of all the legendary concertos and operas written by these people, all of a sudden came out Fidelio- an opera written by Beethoven. The opera is basically themed around a guard named Fidelio’s adventurous venture to rescue her husband Florestan from death from a Political Prison. The Opera is no doubt legendary, but something haunts around the time internal of 1.37-2.00 minutes - a sound quite “DEVILISH”. Similarly, something was found haunting in Wagner’s Gotterdammerung.

So, what  was it that people found so much haunting in that music ? The answer is THE TRITONE- a three note piece which was initially thought of summoning the devil, or simply the devil’s music.

The first use of the tritone is found in Tartini’s Devil Trill Sonata, and also Nicolai Paganini, also known as The Devils Violinist.

So, what exactly is the tritone? What makes it so much haunting? Let us see now. The tritone- also known as The Devils Interval or a chord having an Augmented Fourth (A4) and Diminished Fifth (d5) – is a three-note piece comprising of 6 semitones or 3 Whole Adjacent notes in scale. A tritone occurs only once in a diatonic scale, one for each octave. When played, the sound that we hear is a bit disturbing, or as we can say- DEVILISH. A tritone can be used as a ‘pathway’ for releasing the tension created between notes, to get a relieved of the anxiety for the listeners, but always remains un-noticed.

While most of the classical musicians and composers have been using this 3-note piece for ages in their music, the tritone was not noticed much- until one day when a person was practicing Mars, The Bringer of War written by Gustav Holst from the suite The Planets written way back in 1914. The triad was noticed by his guitarist friend and when the guitarist played on guitar, creating some unsettling fearsome and tensed music, resulting in birth of heavy metal music. The name of the person was Geezer Butler, a bassist and a classically trained musician, and Tony Iommi, a legendary guitar virtuoso, both of the legendary Heavy Metal band Black Sabbath. Yes, they created the song Black Sabbath in the album Black Sabbath- the first ever haunting song written by anyone ever.

Like I have mentioned above, the tritone was not noticed much until it was made loud enough to notice by Black Sabbath. However, one can find small references in songs like Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix or My God by Jethro Tull. Since then, the tritone has been prevalent in the history of Rock N Roll, with bands like King Diamond, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost and Bathory using it to make the most devilish music that ever existed, thus laying down the foundation stone of Black Metal music- one of the most evil and devilish and extreme genres of metal.

The tritone, as we have known now, is also the devil’s music, banned by many Churches and many other Holy Places on earth- with the only reason being it might summon the devil. Pieces having the Tritone are also referred to as Devil Dwelling music, and it surely disturbs the harmony. How? Well just use the augmented fourth (Flat Fifth Note) in your music scale, and there you go- you have un harmonic music created. However, no such evidence has been found about the devil’s presence after playing such music, regardless of the gossip of the Tritone.

With this, I hope the readers got some idea about what exactly the music is haunted in heavy metal music. Although it was loud enough, one can surely now not help to say that Heavy Metal music is Partially responsible for making the devils music loud. We surely must understand that classical music has very much influenced heavy metal music, eventually becoming one of its building blocks. Can we say now that Heavy Metal music fans and Classical music fans share some similarities??

Find below the link for the clip of my explanation and recitation on guitar explaining the Tritone.

References:

1.       Wikipedia

2.       Fender Website (The Devils Tritone: The History of a Most Sinister Chord)

3.       Youtube