Devil in the chords

The pleasure of dissonance

On a golden evening, when the working day is done, there is one drink I find myself craving more than any other: the Negroni. Blood red, rocks clinking against the glass, thick twist of orange rind. The sweetness of Vermouth rubbing up against the bitter Campari, brought together with a hit of gin. It is the devil in a glass.

It took me a while to come round to the Negroni. Like olives and red wine, my very first taste of it made me crinkle my nose in a sort of delighted disgust. Acquired tastes.

In predictable fashion, the Aperol Spritz was my gateway drug, enjoyed almost ritualistically on my year abroad in Florence almost a decade ago. I desperately wanted to like the Negroni too – the sleek older sister of the Italian cocktail family – but it wasn’t so instantly likeable. Unlike the people-pleasing Spritz, fizzing with easy charm, the Negroni isn’t interested in making friends. It is unapologetically bitter. Our brains scream poison. And yet, it is in this dissonance that I have slowly come to find pleasure.

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We have a natural inclination towards consonance, a quality that translates as pleasantness and agreeability. The image that springs to mind is a perfectly ripe apple – sweet, crisp and clean. Consonance is about harmony, all the elements in perfect balance. Like a golden Sauternes, acidity matched by sweetness, ripeness and complexity.

There is a symmetry to consonance. Harmony is close to godliness – as the composers of 15th century Europe were all too aware. Just as a cathedral is built according to the clean lines of order, music had this architectural element too.

That things simply sound nice might seem as natural as birdsong, but more often than not, there are a complex set of formulas that give rise to the sensation. For all its expressiveness and emotional power, music is mathematical in nature, constructed from sequences, cadences and intervals. Mess with the formula, and the ear picks it up instantly. A wrong note is akin to the feeling of walking up the stairs in the dark and expecting another step: an unexpected cadence, foot falling through empty space. It defies the logical order.

One interval in particular has such an innately unpleasant, dissonant quality that it came to be associated with evil and foreboding. Enter the tritone, diabolus in musica. Street name: the devil chord.

The tritone is the antithesis of order and symmetry. An interval of three whole tones on a musical scale (originally F to B), it sits awkwardly between a perfect fourth and a perfect fifth. To put this into context, Classical Radio Boston helpfully points out that a perfect fourth is the first two notes of Here Comes the Bride, while a perfect fifth is the first two notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The tritone, on the other hand, in the first two notes of Purple Haze.

While Jimi Hendrix pulls it off with diabolical flair, you don’t need to be a musician to know that there’s something off about this interval. All the elements are out of place. It is begging for resolution – a return to the sunlit meadow of harmony. Baroque composers like Bach understood this well, sprinkling the devil in liberally to create tension, building towards a satisfying resolution.

But when the tritone goes unresolved, an unsettled feeling takes hold. So begins a dark descent to hell.

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Franz Liszt’s Dante Sonata (1856) is brimming with tritones. Swirling, tumbling, wailing, dragging us down into a sonic underworld of tonal ambiguity. Just when we think we’ve found some solid ground, the terrain shifts again beneath our feet. We are swept up in a maelstrom of dissonance, stroke by stroke painting a dense, claustrophobic image of a descent through Dante’s nine circles of hell, each layer teeming with damned souls.

Heavy metal may seem a far cry from the classical sonatas of the 19th century, but lovers of both genres often point to their similarities. Listen to Dante Sonata back-to-back with Black Sabbath (1970) and there are glimmers of the same dark tonal territory.

But Black Sabbath’s eponymous track owes more to Gustav Holst than it does to Liszt. Bassist Geezer Butler was an unlikely fan of the English composer, and borrowed the opening passage of Mars from The Planets suite – a disturbing, dissonant passage paved with tritones. It was a turning point in the history of heavy metal. The devil chord has been a perfect match for the genre ever since, imbuing it with that dark, occult flavour that its fans so love.

But Butler was by no means the first rockstar to dabble with the devil chord. Hendrix got there three years earlier with Purple Haze (1967). The song starts with the tritone’s devilish declaration, moving between B-flat to E, before the doors open onto a dissonant psychedelic landscape. It sounds like an electric blues guitar being played on another planet, where a change in the atmosphere makes everything sound slightly off.

Hendrix, an avid science fiction reader, is said to have drawn some of his inspiration from the book Night of Light by Philip José Farmer, which tells the tale of “a mysterious radiation that causes the fabric of reality to morph and distort. Statues come to life. People turn into trees. Perception becomes a frightening, chaotic kaleidoscope… a ‘purplish haze,’” writes Jason Heller.

Like Dante’s Inferno, this kaleidoscopic pandemonium is an inversion of beauty, order and goodness. It is the manifestation of chaos. There is no place for consonance in such a world. How thrillingly magical that this formless dystopia is brought to life instantly in that small, significant space between B-flat and E.

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For music to sound pleasing to the ear, it must follow certain rules. But why it makes us feel the way we do remains a beguiling mystery. Consonant forms are beautiful because our brains are hardwired to look for symmetry, yet this doesn’t explain why we also find pleasure in dissonance. It seems we enjoy being disturbed as much as we like to be delighted, sometimes both simultaneously.

In the murky intervals between notes, there is space for interpretation – and instrumental music, in particular, invites us to such flights of fantasy. It appeals to us on an emotional level, moves us with abstract forms. A chromatic shift signals the onset of chaos, while a soaring melody scoops us in its wings and takes us to paradise – even though all we see on the page is a flurry of black marks against white paper. We are filling in the blanks, moving through the spaces between the sounds. More often than not, the journey is logical, and we anticipate the next step to land on solid ground. But sometimes, the ground is unstable, and we find ourselves following a slippery path down to some dark and formless place.

So, just for a moment, let’s venture down to hell.

There’s a good cocktail bar where the boatman drops you off – the equivalent of a station pub, if you like. The air is thick with cigar smoke, and you can just make out the impeccably dressed clientele through the haze – all black velvet, ornate ruffles and shiny platform boots. Medieval camp meets T-Rex, with a dash of Led Zeppelin – this is hell, darling! The menu is written in a ridiculous Gothic font, and lists an excellent selection of classic cocktails. It’s always aperitivo hour here. There’s also a very good selection of whiskies, tequilas, mezcals – the smokier, the better. Some weird medicinal herbal stuff made by monks who’ve since converted to Satanism. All the nasty acquired tastes you could wish for.

We sip our bitter, smoky, fiery drinks while dissonant rock plays overhead. Purple Haze, Station to Station, Enter Sandman. Besides Bach, Liszt and Black Sabbath. Oh, and The Beatles, of course – the ones who started this whole diabolical affair.

The devil stirs in every one of these songs, written into the chords themselves. It’s rumoured the boss may even make an appearance tonight – the bartender is already preparing the Negronis.