Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [29]
And then, before I’m even halfway through the first page, Dad says, “Can you stop, please? I’m trying to work.”
“So am I,” I say testily.
He turns around. “You need to start on your thesis, not play your guitar.”
“This is my thesis.” Or more accurately, it would be my thesis, if I was still planning on doing one.
He looks skeptical. “Really? What’s your premise?” he says.
“That if there was no Amadé Malherbeau, there would be no Radiohead,” I say, hoping that ends it. But no.
“Why Malherbeau? What was so special about him?” He looks like he’s actually interested in what I’m saying. Which is unusual.
“He broke a lot of rules,” I say. “He refused to write pretty harmonies. Got way into the minor chords. And dissonance. He started playing around with the Diabolus in Musica, and—”
“The what?”
“The Diabolus in Musica. The devil in the music.”
“What the hell is that?”
“So funny, Dad.”
He smiles at his lame joke, then says, “No, really. I’m serious.”
“It’s another name for an augmented fourth,” I say.
“And an augmented fourth is?”
I hesitate before I answer. Because I’m suspicious. This is too weird, this sudden interest in music. He’s up to something.
“It’s a tritone—an interval that stretches across three tones,” I finally say. “It’s used to create dissonance in harmonies.” He looks blank. I think for a minute, then add, “You know when Tony sings ‘Maria’ in West Side Story? That’s a tritone. Tritones are in the opening bars of ‘Purple Haze,’ too. And in the theme song to The Simpsons.”
“But why is it called the devil in the music?”
“Well, one answer is that tritones can sound off-kilter, a bit sinister. But it’s really more about the tritone creating harmonic tensions in a piece of music—and then leaving that tension unresolved. Kind of like asking a question that can’t be answered.”
“And that makes it devilish?”
“The tritone got that name during the Middle Ages because church authorities didn’t like questions. People who asked too many questions tended to find themselves tied to a stake and set on fire. The church didn’t allow the guys who composed sacred music—which was like, the best gig a musician could get back then—to use tritones.”
I’m into it now. Really blabbering away. Because there’s nothing I love more than a good, freaky tritone. In fact, I’m so into it that I forget my suspicions. Forget my doubts. Forget that I know better.
“So Malherbeau was the first to use them?” he asks.
“No, Dad. Changes in harmony—in the accepted ideas of what harmony should be—began waaaay before Malherbeau. Composers started to break away from the old rules during the Renaissance. By the Baroque era, Bach was using tritones—sparingly, yeah, but he was using them. Same with Haydn and later Mozart. Then Beethoven came along and turned the dial up on dissonance. And Malherbeau, who was influenced by Beethoven, turned it up even higher.”
“But Beethoven didn’t play guitar. He played piano.”
“Yeah … so?”
“So how did he influence a guitar player?”
I want to slap my own forehead. “Um, Dad? Guitarists don’t just listen to guitars. They listen to music. You can hear Malherbeau’s guitar in Liszt’s piano. You can hear it again, much later, in Debussy and Satie. And then in Messiaen, a nutty French composer who went way off into left field and did all this crazy sh—stuff, like inventing his own instruments and listening to birdsong. You can hear Malherbeau in America, too. In a lot of blues and jazz stylings. John Lee Hooker drew from him. So did Ellington and Miles Davis. A lot of alt bands like Joy Division and the Smiths show his influence.”
“So how would you actually demonstrate the comparisons?” he asks, interrupting me.
“With examples,” I tell him, impatiently. “And then there’s Jonny Greenwood, who’s totally Malherbeau’s musical heir. A guitarist who’s pushing boundaries again, just like Malherbeau did, creating something new and gorgeous, and—”
“Hold on. What examples?” Dad asks.
“Bits of music.