The Devil is in the Music!

When I took Musicology 101 I was shocked to find out that many of my theories of music were right on. I hadn’t really thought of it very much, just intuited much of it from my Christian upbringing and my aversion to the Christian doctrine. Years earlier I had obtained an old poster of Stravinksy’s "Diabolus in Meusica" concert, the 15^th of October 1830, in Barcelona, which I so love and had not a clue as to how important it would become to me spiritually (not to mention its miraculous survival of a hurricane in the 70’s). I purchased it based on my love of “The Firebird,” due to my “Good Christian Upbringing” and Stravinsky and the simple aesthetic of the ancient poster.

The basic theories surround Dissonance and Consonance. Simplistically it comes down to the scales. The dissonance scales had fewer notes and the Consonance scales had more notes. You know do, re, mi, fa, sol, etc. (C, D, E, F, G, etc.) Consonance allows for half notes and quarter notes, etc. The original dissonant scale and instruments didn’t allow for that so theoretically at least there was little chance of consonance and hence their primitive and pagan ideation. My understanding is that consonance lead to the emergence of the Romantics and Lord knows I love Tchaikovsky.

That said, I never understood the need to assign one type of music to Christianity and another type of music to Paganism. That dissonance in music was Pagan and that consonance was Christian frankly always bothered me.

Now because I am a “Pagan” at heart and have always embraced dissonance I guess when I purchased that poster from the 1830 concert I knew something that I didn’t really understand but truly knew.

Consonance:

Dissonance:

Though I couldn’t find anything from "Diabolus in Meusica" the “Devil’s Dance” is a pretty good representation of the dissonance model.

This is a rather simplistic presentation but it does show that religion as politics as music is everywhere and has a very rich history!

Things that make you go HMMMM…! Credit to C+C Music Factory, speaking of consonance and dissonance.