Was the musical interval known as the “tritone” really banned in the Middle Ages? Was it really seen as diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”) by the Catholics — mostly monks — responsible for our beautiful patrimony of Gregorian Chant?
When I was in the School of Music at LSU, I was fed this hokum and believed it. It was not until some few months ago, while in a chant rehearsal with John Sharpe, that I heard someone challenge this narrative for the very first time. Being a largely self-taught but quite knowledgeable schola director (an amateur in the true sense), John knows enough of the breadth of the corpus of Gregorian chant to question this fictitious claim.
Recently, when I was looking up something about the tritone (a quick fact-check for this piece), I happened upon an informative video by Adam Neely, a New York City-based bass player and composer, who produces interesting music theory videos on YouTube. Mr. Neely gets a little silly and campy at times in his videos (it’s his shtick), but he is very intelligent and apparently does a lot of research. In the video embedded below, he completely obliterates the myth of the diabolus in musica being a medieval prohibition against the tritone. He also has a grand time showing how many uninformed musicians keep repeating the claim, making it grow to ever-greater levels of absurdity in this multi-generational game of telephone. The funniest is the claim that someone could be excommunicated in the Middle Ages for using the tritone. (Ah, those stupid, superstitious Catholics of the Middle Ages!)
If you don’t know what the interval is and you have read this far but have no intention to watch the video, fear not! I can explain that the tritone is an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth, depending on how you look at it. Go to a piano and play middle C then the F# above it. That’s a tritone. There are three whole steps between the bottom and top notes of the interval, hence the name. Because this interval also splits the octave exactly in half, there are also three whole steps from the upper note (in this instance, the F#), and the higher octave of the bottom note (the C above middle C). The interval is dissonant. It’s also hard to sing in a melodic line, but it can be used for great musical effect, as when Gustav Holst employs it in the haunting and evocatively violent first movement of The Planets, “Mars, the Bringer of War.”
I was very gratified to learn that this is one more myth about the Middle Ages that can be tossed in the trash. Thank you, Adam Neely!
