Post by shoshin on Apr 22, 2017 23:54:52 GMT
On another thread, Gary recently drew attention to a similarity between Dancing Queen and Blondie's Dreaming. The distinctive feature is that they briefly employ a Lydian tritone. Strangely enough, we don't yet seem to have had an ABBAchat thread wholly devoted to the tritone, aka augmented fourth, or diminished fifth. I want to put that right for several reasons:
1) It is relatively uncommon in pop music, and is thus one of those musical markers that showcases Benny and Bjorn's (or maybe just Benny's?) superior compositional skills.
2) For those fans who find most ABBA quizzes and games yawningly easy-peasy, playing Hunt the Tritone might disable smug mode for a while.
3) For centuries, the tritone interval has been known as diabolus in musica: 'the Devil in music'. Diabbalus, geddit? Like a Sun headline sub-editor, I can't resist a thread title that more or less writes itself.
Skip the next paragraph or two, if you already know what a tritone is thank you very much. It is an interval of three whole notes. Because our ears are used to hearing major and minor scales whose fourth notes (do re mi fa so) are only two and a half notes apart, the tritone sounds sharp, dissonant, weird, full of foreboding and difficult to sing (hence the 'Devil' moniker). It hardly seems like fertile ground for a popular music songwriter. But when Leonard Bernstein wrote West Side Story, he stood convention on its head by spraying tritones all over the place. The key to recognising a tritone in Abba's music is to think of the West Side Story song Maria: 'Ma-ri-a, I just met a girl..' . The 'ri' makes a tritone with the root note of the chord (in what's called a Lydian scale or mode). It sounds for a moment as if the singer has hit a flat note, until it is resolved upwards to finish the Ma-ri-a'. Another example (there aren't that many well known ones) is the Simpson's theme: 'The-Sim-psons'.
So, where in Dancing Queen does the Lydian tritone get its moment in the pop sunlight? Well, it's the 'Young' in 'Young and sweet', and the 'See' in 'See that girl'.
To the quiz at last. As we know, once Benny and Bjorn hit on something interesting, they can seldom resist returning to it multiple times. There must surely be further examples of that distinctive sharp fourth note in ABBA songs. So help me to find them
I can think of one, to start us off. It's right at the beginning of a track on Arrival. Can you identify the track I have in mind?
Here's what a tritone sounds like:
tritone examples
1) It is relatively uncommon in pop music, and is thus one of those musical markers that showcases Benny and Bjorn's (or maybe just Benny's?) superior compositional skills.
2) For those fans who find most ABBA quizzes and games yawningly easy-peasy, playing Hunt the Tritone might disable smug mode for a while.
3) For centuries, the tritone interval has been known as diabolus in musica: 'the Devil in music'. Diabbalus, geddit? Like a Sun headline sub-editor, I can't resist a thread title that more or less writes itself.
Skip the next paragraph or two, if you already know what a tritone is thank you very much. It is an interval of three whole notes. Because our ears are used to hearing major and minor scales whose fourth notes (do re mi fa so) are only two and a half notes apart, the tritone sounds sharp, dissonant, weird, full of foreboding and difficult to sing (hence the 'Devil' moniker). It hardly seems like fertile ground for a popular music songwriter. But when Leonard Bernstein wrote West Side Story, he stood convention on its head by spraying tritones all over the place. The key to recognising a tritone in Abba's music is to think of the West Side Story song Maria: 'Ma-ri-a, I just met a girl..' . The 'ri' makes a tritone with the root note of the chord (in what's called a Lydian scale or mode). It sounds for a moment as if the singer has hit a flat note, until it is resolved upwards to finish the Ma-ri-a'. Another example (there aren't that many well known ones) is the Simpson's theme: 'The-Sim-psons'.
So, where in Dancing Queen does the Lydian tritone get its moment in the pop sunlight? Well, it's the 'Young' in 'Young and sweet', and the 'See' in 'See that girl'.
To the quiz at last. As we know, once Benny and Bjorn hit on something interesting, they can seldom resist returning to it multiple times. There must surely be further examples of that distinctive sharp fourth note in ABBA songs. So help me to find them
I can think of one, to start us off. It's right at the beginning of a track on Arrival. Can you identify the track I have in mind?
Here's what a tritone sounds like:
tritone examples
