Is it really true that the diminished chord (mb5) was banned by churches for sounding demonic? And if so, how did it become un-banned?

by MrSeismic

I'm picturing underground 12th century concerts where they rock out to diminished chords.

sunagainstgold

Not quite. But there is a really interesting and longstanding relationship between the devil and music from at least the Middle Ages on. Borrowing from an earlier answer of mine:

Music was everywhere in the Latin Middle Ages, from the troubadours of the 12th century Languedoc to the dances that accompanied sessions of the imperial Reichstag. But the medieval people who wrote, who theorized about music were above all monks and nuns, and they lived in idyllic world soaked through with music.

The lives of monks and nuns centered on praying the Divine Office: meeting communally throughout the day to sing in prayer. This fundamental, defining aspect of monastic life partnered with the literary topos of the monastery as gateway to heaven, or even better, an extension of paradise onto earth. To medieval monastic writers, heaven was a place of song. Hildegard of Bingen, who argued passionately that sacred music recapitulated (reached back to and temporarily recreated) the state of the world before the Fall of Man, had a vision of souls in paradise:

On their heads they wore crowns intertwined with god and roses and lilies and pipes of the most precious stones. When the Lamb of God used his voice, the wind coming from the secret place of God touched these pipes so that they resounded with every type of sound that a harp and organ make...And [the souls] carried lyres in their hands, which they played.

Hildegard and other monastic writers would have known they stood on firm biblical ground. In 1 Samuel 16, David plays the harp to drive diabolical spirits away from Saul. Late medieval literature is clear on the idea that musical harmony drives out the devil, because the devil can't tolerate anything harmonious. The Malleus malificarum, the infamous 15th century witchhunting manual, specifically cites the story of David and Saul in recommending music as a bulwark against witchcraft! Renaissance literature on music picks up this line of thought: Musica est maximum diaboli tormentum.

So how do we get from music as divine paladin against Satan, to music as Satan's hammer? Two currents flow out of what I've discussed above.

First, 11C monk and writer of musical theory Guido of Arezzo (fun fact: credited with inventing the first iteration of do-re-mi) argued for the elimination of a musical element called the tritone, a particularly unharmonious-sounding chord. Music, to the medieval theorists, was harmony, so anything nonharmonious ought to be eliminated from music. Although Guido does not use the term himself, 1702 marks the first known evidence of the tritone's nickname that endures today: Diabolus in musica, the devil in music. But Werckmeister's casual dropping of the term in writing suggests it was already in popular useage by that point.

To bridge the gap between music=harmony=heaven of Hildegard and music=harmony and disharmony=room for the devil of the 18th century, we turn back to our witchhunters.

The devil, to people of the 16th century, was anything abnormal and out of order--unharmonious. What could be more out of order than an uneducated, illiterate peasant singing songs in Latin? What could be more out of order than a slave playing the trumpet better than any trained musician? Music was not just a tool to drive out the devil: it became a sign of the devil's presence. Laurence Wuidar dug up a fantastic tale from late 16C Italy to illustrate this point. A group of people were lured up into the hills of Bologna by a wondrous sound coming from a cloud. They looked up and saw a black servant "playing the viola da gamba better than all the country's professional musicians." It was the devil, worming his way into people's minds and hearts through musical trickery.

The medieval monastic tradition, rising out of a lifestyle centered on music, believed in the harmony of creation, in creation as a harmonious song. The devil lived in dissonance. But amidst a growing fear of Satan's power in people and musical experimentation with chords considered unharmonious, the devil came to dwell in music.

ThySecondOne

I've heard that church music could not end in minor cords. Is this also true?