Phil Rice 00:16
At its core, music is a game of intervals, the spaces between the notes. The whole character of a musical passage is defined by those intervals. Someone with absolutely no musical training can identify the difference between the happy sound of a major chord and the sad sound of a minor chord. It's an almost universal language. The difference between them is one simple interval. Over the centuries of Western music tradition, some intervals are considered unnerving, even evil, the dissonant half a tone interval is one everyone will recognize from John Williams' iconic film score about a certain hungry, toothy threat, or from the theme from John Carpenter's horror classic, which delivers a creepy sense of foreboding. But the most notorious of them all, at some point, earned the name the devil's interval, the tritone, the midpoint of an octave. The tritone was long considered a forbidden sound, before Romantic era, composers began to embrace it and unlocked its magic. It's a tantalizing sound that almost cries out for resolution, an unfulfilled yearning employed deliberately. It can have unmistakable menace. Take Mars, the bringer of war, by Gustav Holst, for example, or Night on Bald Mountain by Misorgsky, a classic horror tune, if ever there was one, the tritone has proved a modern favorite for bands wanting to evoke a darker vibe, Black Sabbath, Metallica. Marilyn Manson, I made deliberate use of it in my own song, Walking Papers on Mad homonyms album, save save as what is perhaps most interesting about the tritone interval is its quintessential nature when it comes to jazz. It turns out that the seventh chords so common in jazz arrangements are most clearly defined by the third and flat seventh notes of a chord. In fact, all you need to convey a seventh chord is a third, a seventh, and typically provided by the bass, the tonic or first note, and the interval between that essential third and flat seventh, you guessed it, a tritone. Here's where it gets wild. Take that same tritone, third and seventh, and pair it with a tonic note, a tritone away, and it works there too, this time as a flat seventh and a third. Jazz players use this to perform something called chord substitutions, to stylistically transition between common changes and give them a more bluesy, colorful feel. Experiment around with intervals, and you'll introduce yourself to a variety of sounds, both conventional and unconventional, giving your next musical score a new flavor. Check the description for links to full versions to all the music referenced here you