The augmented fourth has had more than one introduction to America. The most profound one is found in the melodies of early American black musicians who bent the third upwards and landed on the fifth a little flat. That’s blues and jazz and everything that we now take for granted. However, another entrance of the so-called “devil’s interval” came from another direction. This most notably arrived in a ruckus; the debut of Rites of Spring by Igor Stravinsky in 1913. What Stravinsky did was relatively simple by modern day tactics. He superimposed two triad chords on top of one another. This “accidentally” created an inharmonic chord structure. This created conflicting fifths. It wasn’t long before Jazz not only adopted the linear movement of the flatted fifth, but thanks to geniuses like Duke Ellington fit the harmonic version quite comfortably within more complex arrangements. Bop, the master music of applying the flatted fifth, could only make it fly. I jest with the word “only”. In other words, we are all connected by harmonic and inharmonic values. Go figure.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 06:28:30 +0000
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