I have been messing about with a tritone based blues with a cheeky VI II V I today and it got me thinking about the historical importance of the Flat 5th tritone. Played in context the flat 5th has a very sinister sound which caused it to be labelled as 'The Devil's Note'. The use of the flat 5th was apparently banned in churches for hundreds of years due to fears that playing the note would actually conjure the devil.
This then started me thinking about blues being labelled the 'The Devil's Music' and the uproar caused by taking gospel music and adding raunchy/seductive lyrics.
I am interested in delving deeper into these subjects. Does anybody have any recommendations of essential literary material or documentaries that cover these areas?
---------- "You will never get every possible thing out of an instrument, but the instrument will get every possible thing out of you" - Ray Charles.
I don't much on the topic. I know before standardized tuning each key was tuned a little differently and different keys and modes where thought to have different feelings. I know a lot of songs skirted around talking openly about issues of race and sex with code words. It seems a lot of songs have alternate verses depending on who sings them and where. Let us know if you find any good sources. Maybe tomorrow I'll do some web searches. Good topic.
i am a little south of being called a yooper, adam.
do we need to read your paper in the journal, in serial form no less, or are you gonna give us your entire paper to read. i remember you having a thread about it. i thought it was to be a book.
one more thing, though my brother is a professor at noter dame, i never asked him about this. is it common for a prof to have something published OUTSIDE his university/employer? it seems like they would want all the fruits of your labors
@ GermanHarpist - I bashed those keys for so long waiting for something to happen. All I managed to conjure was a blister :0
Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.
Further to my original post I have searched around a bit and would like to make a few amendments.
Some call the flat 5th 'The Devil's Note' or 'Devil's Tone', but it seems the majority would regard the 'Devil's Tone' as being the combination of Root and Flat 5th played simultaneously, a tritone, hence Zack's 'Devil's Tritone'. This makes perfect sense to me as the use of the flat 5th against a bass line based around the root, although dissonant, doesn't quite have that powerful, sinister sound or evoke the same mood as the tritone interval.
Nacoran touched on something important too regarding an instruments tunings over the centuries. When I sit at the piano and play the tritone I am not hearing exactly what people would have heard back then. So at the time when the use of the 'Devil's Tritone' was banned by the church across Europe what did it sound like and how would the sound differ from that heard on modern 12TET instruments?
In my search I discovered a website which I found to be quite interesting. It touches on the suppression of the 'Devil's Interval' by the Roman Catholic Church, but there's lots of other interesting info to be perused, digested and debated.
---------- "You will never get every possible thing out of an instrument, but the instrument will get every possible thing out of you" - Ray Charles.
Last Edited by on Sep 07, 2010 11:14 AM
@eharp: It's actually rare for universities to publish the work of their professors. In the old days, it happened from time to time. The Princeton University Press, for example, would sometimes have published the monographs of its professors back in the 1940s and 50s. But there's rarely a one-to-one conjunction between the research topics pursued by a given institution's faculty and the university press and/or journals that are sited at that university.
No, my university, like most, is happy simply to have my name "out there," appended to articles in reputable publications, with "associate professor at the University of Mississippi" as a part of that ID.
I'm writing a six-chapter book. Arkansas Review is going to publish the first chapter as two articles, the first of which comes out any day now. I've submitted the second chapter to African American Review, the premier journal of African American literary studies. After that, I'll probably just finish the book. When seeking a book contract, it helps to have SOME pre-publication of individual chapters in journal form, but I wouldn't want to pre-publish all of it that way. It's a balancing act. Basically it's best to simply finished the damned book, so you can thump it on an editor's desk and no imagination or trust ("Will he complete it in a timely way?") is needed.
@Lee, Mesing around with a cheeky Vi, ii, V, i, ? What have I told you about going off piste like that. ...........or as Big walter reputedly said about the chromatic...."Messin with that crazy stuff is gonna fry your brain" ;-)
So has anybody read any good books which go into the blues and religion connection?
I do find it fascinating how people of faith would condemn musicians for commercialising gospel music and making money off of the back of the Lord. Clearly they were unable to see that this is exactly what their own ministers were guilty of.
---------- "You will never get every possible thing out of an instrument, but the instrument will get every possible thing out of you" - Ray Charles.
Last Edited by on Sep 07, 2010 11:41 AM
