Has music always been "the work of the devil"?

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Not only rock, but, shoot, a lot of classical composers would be considered "Satanic" to a paranoid Christian. How much of this article do you suspect is true? (I think most or all of it is and yet it means nothing to me, nor am I concerned). I wonder if being "illuminated" helped their musical abilities at all, through placebo effect or not.

― Scaredy cat (Natola), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:00 (twenty-three years ago)

BTW, this article really gets "interesting" about the time they get to Debussy and thereafter:

... "Across the Channel, France produced its own esoteric musicians. Claude Debussy, that master of musical impressionism, was familiar with the occult circles of fin-de-siecle Paris and incorporated many esoteric ideas in his works (Orledge 46, 47, 49, 124 -7). Ethereal compositions like Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894) evoke the astral realm of nature spirits and elementals. Debussy wrote his opera Pelleas et Melisande(1902) based on the play by the Belgian symbolist and esotericist Maurice Maeterlinck, and used phi, the golden section—part of the canon of ancient sacred geometry—in his compositions. (Another composer who used the golden section was the Hungarian Bela Bartok.)

Claims for Debussy’s occult pedigree run high. In his book Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages(first published in 1933), Cyril Scott, a composer and Theosophist, remarked that Debussy was used by the “Higher Ones” to introduce ancient Atlantean music into the modern age. More recently, the authors of the best selling Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln) claimed that Debussy was one of the “Grand Masters” of the mysterious esoteric society the Priory of Sion—coming in between Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau. Erik Satie, Debussy’s contemporary, was a member of the occultist Joséphin Péladan’s Salon de la Rose+Croix and Ordre de la Rose+Croix Catholique, and hob-nobbed at Edmond Bailly’s occult bookshop, a famous rendezvous for Parisian esotericists at the turn of the last century."

― Scaredy cat (Natola), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:05 (twenty-three years ago)

this was thought to be true for a lot of composers of the romantic period. there is also the myth about the violin being the instrument of satan, paganini is thought to have sold his soul to satan in order that he could be a virtuoso violinist.

― di smith (lucylurex), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:12 (twenty-three years ago)

Ah yes, I remember the violin thing.

For clarification, do you mean:

1. "thought to be true" meaning that they weren't really into mystical stuff

2. "thought to be true" meaning supernatural were responsible for their music

― Scaredy cat (Natola), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:16 (twenty-three years ago)

https://www.cedillerecords.org/041.html

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:19 (twenty-three years ago)

should read:

2. "thought to be true" meaning supernatural were thought to be responsible for their music

― Scaredy cat (Natola), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:20 (twenty-three years ago)

https://www.cedillerecords.org/041.html

That is awesome!... and would be even more awesome if she were the daughter of Blanche Barton.

― Scaredy cat (Natola), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:23 (twenty-three years ago)

i meant option 2.

― di smith (lucylurex), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 03:40 (twenty-three years ago)

I remember reading in - I think - Charles Shaar Murray's Crosstown Traffic that the opening of "Purple Haze" was actually as blasphemous as it sounds: centuries ago that chord progression was actually banned by the church. Can anyone verify this?

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 04:50 (twenty-three years ago)

[offtopic but i can think of a few chord progressions i'd like to see banned]

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 04:53 (twenty-three years ago)

While I do not consider myself an expert in this area, I do know for a fact that centuries ago, any high noise was considered to be the work of the devil. The high pitched sound of a bullet being fired was said to be the devil screaming while riding the piece of metal. With superstition like this, I would entirely believe that certain pieces must have been considered to be Satanic.
However, let us not forget the significance of chant/song in early christain ritual up through today, so to claim that music has always been the work of the devil is somewhat misleading. I guess music is like any other aspect of life in the eyes of the church, has its good and bad sides.

― Bryan Moore, Wednesday, 9 July 2003 05:39 (twenty-three years ago)

Is this why Pitchfork is called Pitchfork?

― David A. (Davant), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 06:12 (twenty-three years ago)

ding ding ding!

― James Blount (James Blount), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 06:21 (twenty-three years ago)

See Thomas Mann (esp Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Dr Faustus) for extensive analysis of bourgoise Protestant angst caused by fear of music. It appealed only to the senses (unlike literature which also appealed to the reason) and was therefore by definition a source of social and moral corruption, continually discussed in terms disease imagery. Wagner was particularly suspect because of his obvious immersion in sensuality but eg Beethoven was by no means without taint. A lifelong obsession for Mann, deeply troubled by his own love of music, especially Wagner. Wagner's influence on Nazism and anti-Semitism would have obviously have helped convince M that his anxieties were well-founded.

― ArfArf, Wednesday, 9 July 2003 11:11 (twenty-three years ago)

plato proscribed certain modes in "the republic", maintaining that they inspired all manner of antisocial, destructive behaviour.

― cameron, Wednesday, 9 July 2003 11:54 (twenty-three years ago)

CS Lewis (in the Screwtape Letters) asserted that heaven has only two sonic modes: Music and Silence...and it was the job of hell to replace music and silence with Noooiiizzzze.
Ergo, the devil wants Pavement and Michael Bolton to merge into one horrible noise making thing. Then he would be truly happy.

― Lord Custos Epsilon (Lord Custos Epsilon), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:01 (twenty-three years ago)

It's interesting to me that in some Islamic societies where music has been accepted, it has been acknowledge as a form of magic, but "licit magic."

― Rockist Scientist, Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:09 (twenty-three years ago)

I like how this thread is becoming a collection of disjointed thoughts on the matter.

― Rockist Scientist, Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:18 (twenty-three years ago)

I think you mean what's known as the devil's chord (diabolus in musica? something.), Justyn - a tritone, which is comparable to a suspended fourth, I think. C to F#, essentially: one of the most painful intervals. Britten uses it in his War Requiem to really pile on the DOOM. (can't confirm the Crosstown Traffic thing, as I have a pathological fear of Hendrix).

Tartini - composer of the classical era (18th century), very important in developing violin techniques and lengthening the bow - is reputed to have had a dream in which the Devil was his servant and played him the most perfect sonata, the inspiration for his "devil's trill" sonata.

― cis (cis), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:23 (twenty-three years ago)

Justyn, YES that's the devil's/black progression/change or something (I'm presuming it is in "Purple Haze", anyway). Black Sabbath and the Fall have used it a bit too. I'm including this post despite having cis's above mine as I type, this is clearly a sign of the cosmic forces invoked by even mentioning the thing.

― Andrew Thames (Andrew Thames), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:25 (twenty-three years ago)

"Sublette mentioned, in passing, the fascinating history of two old Spanish-American dances, the zarabanda and the chacona, which probably stemmed from the Afro-Caribbean melting pot. They spread to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and helped shape some of the masterpieces of the Baroque. In Seattle, I got to thinking about the tangled history of the chacona, or chaconne, which has appeared in so many diverse places in the past five hundred years that it could be considered one of the iconic images of the universal language. It is identifiable by its bass line: a constantly repeating, often downward-plunging figure, over which higher instruments and voices play variations. “A dance in the way of the mulatto’s,” Cervantes called it. The lyrics were bawdy and irreverent; the music was said to have been invented by the Devil. "

From that New Yorker piece on Rock Studies.

― TMFTML (TMFTML), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:26 (twenty-three years ago)

I like how this thread is becoming a collection of disjointed thoughts on the matter.
Yes...but if you read the thread backwards...

― Lord Custos Epsilon (Lord Custos Epsilon), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:38 (twenty-three years ago)

The tritone was the last interval to become accepted by the Christian church but at one time various other intervals (eg maj 7) were proscribed. In fact I believe only 2 or 3 intervals were acceptable at one time, the more "discordant" intervals being accepted over time. Of course before the tempered scale was invented harmony was extremely unsophisticated anyway.

― ArfArf, Wednesday, 9 July 2003 12:52 (twenty-three years ago)

tritones are dead cool.

― satan (lucylurex), Wednesday, 9 July 2003 22:39 (twenty-three years ago)

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