Fair warning: this article contains music theory terms. You do not necessarily need to know what these terms mean in order to understand the article.
Not everything in life can be enjoyed. Music for the average listener is meant for entertainment, relaxation, or inspiration; it should be enjoyable since it is one of the only art forms built for inducing such satisfaction. Music tells a story in the abstract, and solely the imagination can understand it. If I say to you, “A… F B? Bb C G Ab. C# E F#, D, Eb!” does that make any logical sense? If I were to play it on the keyboard with harmonic accompaniment, then everything would fall into place— except, perhaps, two of these notes: F and B. Why? These two notes, when played simultaneously, create a tritone, the interval which is known for being one of music’s most obnoxious sounds. Nevertheless, they are an integral part of the story told by the music. Why should we single these two notes out? I believe that we do this because the tritone is the interaction between a protagonist and their foil in a story. There is a conflict, yet the story remains smooth and logical. The tritone and the literary foil are borne from different forms of art, yet they are characters with personalities one and the same with one another. We can think about how to write better foils into a story by thinking about its relationship with the tritone.
A tritone is an interval between two notes, usually within the same key, spanning three whole steps on the piano keyboard. For example, if you begin with B and ascend to the next key, C, that is a half step, but if you ascend from B to C#, which is two keys away, that is a whole step. There are only six tritone intervals: B and F, C and F# or Gb (they are enharmonically equivalent to one another,) C# or Db and G, D and G# or Ab, D# or Eb and A, and E and A# or Bb; after this, the cycle repeats. The etymology of the word “tritone” began in medieval times when tonal harmony as we know it today was not common. A certain Latin phrase coined by 18th-century music theorist Johann Fux which has historically been used, in an abbreviated form, to describe the tritone reads, “mi contra fa est diabolus in musica,” meaning “mi against fa is the devil in music.” This analysis is based on the three original hexachord scales (natural, soft, and hard) comprising six notes each, says YouTuber Adam Neely. While the phrase is dated, it may nevertheless speak a timeless truth about the personality of the tritone.
When one plays the tritone without any other accompaniment, it sounds grating and unpleasant; it is also difficult to sing. Because of its unresolved musical nature, meaning that the tritone does not lead into a more satisfying chord when played alone, it can make one feel uneasy and even tense with fear, as it resembles a “primal scream” according to YouTuber 12tone. Humans have evolved from roaming in packs, yet one may still hear the tritone as a screeching death cry for help from a member of their pack. Horror films use the tritone as a tool for making their audiences feel scared, especially when the tritone is played at an abruptly high register. Not only is it frightening, but it is also perceived as evil because it is wicked and harmful to the listener. Of course, music is an abstraction which contains no inherent purpose; that purpose is superimposed by those who analyze it. Singular tritone intervals, in a vacuum if you will, are not evil or scary. When Romantic composers studied Gradus Ad Parnassum, published by Fux, they took his phrase, “the devil in music,” too literally. This English semantic shift acted as a catalyst for the trope of the tritone’s evilness, according to Adam Neely.
The musical interval of the tritone is a classic artistic opposite. There are many examples of artistic opposites that can be found in literature. One of the first which may come to mind is the oxymoron. “Deafening silence” and “original copy” are two oxymora. Each of these phrases contains an expression which “produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect” according to dictionary.com.
However, a more frequent literary opposite is the foil. In literature, a foil is a character who contrasts with any other character in the story in a way which is significant to the trajectory of the story. They can oppose the protagonist, but they do not have to do so. Their job is to simply accentuate the opposing traits of a different personality in the story. The mean-spirited bakery clerk can augment the positivity of the lowly impoverished protagonist. The two most familiar types of foil pairs in literature are the characters who remain opposites throughout the story, and the characters who start off as enemies or perhaps as acquaintances and end up working together to achieve a common goal.
Foils can surely be written as realistic, round characters with complex backgrounds, relationships, and conflicts, yet according to literary critic Blakey Vermeule, author of Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?, flat characters as opposed to round characters have no “inner life” and are typically used as foils to the main characters of the story. This analysis further remarks that foil characters are allegorical stereotypes which are written to represent “some idea or quality.” Literary critic Suzanne Keen adds that “empathy for fictional characters may require only minimal elements of identity, situation, and feeling, not necessarily complex or realistic characterization.”
This is the reality written into buddy movies such as 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon. Professor of Digital Media and Journalism at SUNY New Paltz Gregory Bray says that this buddy format which utilizes openly opposing foil characters began with vaudeville’s show, Laurel and Hardy. In this time, the joke fundamentally starred only “a straight man and a punchline,” yet it became so popular that it entered the silver screen when movies grew increasingly critical for American culture. Classically, buddy movies have paired two male characters together for comedic effect. According to Professor of Social Work at University of Maryland Geoffrey Greif, “men have been socialized to compete with each other from a very early age” because the earliest relationships and connections in the lives of men are typically with women.
While the interpretations by Keen and Vermeule are decidedly pessimistic, they most accurately describe the concept of the trope which is regularly applied to literary foils. Foils are branded by goodness and evilness, or wealth and poverty. Even when these characters work together, their opposite characteristics are greatly emphasized to demonstrate the adage, “opposites attract.” Nevertheless, authors can choose to write their characters as round rather than flat, so the— opposite— explanation must also be valid: opposites do not attract. However, this is the trope which is applied to tritones in music. Tritones are supposèdly not meant to attract. They will always clash— at least this is what the average listener has historically believed about tritones. They have a distinctly sharp yet muddy sound.
How can they possibly work together? After all, a 2003 study conducted by the University of St. Andrews concluded that opposites do not in fact attract. People tend to be more attracted to people with “self-similar characteristics” and the hair and eye color of their parent of the opposite sex. This attraction is “attributed to imprinting processes in infancy.” Couples over time begin to align their individual beliefs too. It seems that in the end, humans desire the recognizable. There will always be good-versus-evil in this existence. Ultimately, the best of friends have gone through the same hardships in life.
On the other hand, Peter Paskale of The Huffington Post would retort that “sometimes it is the preconceived perceptions of the audience themselves that are playing the role of the opposite— the opposite of the truth.” All across literature, media, and speeches containing chiasmi (for example, John F. Kennedy’s, “ask not what your country can do for you— ask what you can do for your country” is a chiasmus,) paired opposites “are the gravity-engine that provide the momentum” of plots in literature and media, lessons in speeches, and themes in musical pieces.
Just as tritones are socially interpreted as evil compared to other, more gratifying musical intervals, foil characters are socially interpreted as flat as compared to the protagonists. As I stated earlier in this article, music is an abstraction which contains no inherent purpose. The same principle may be applied to literature. The “meaning” of a literary work all depends upon that which the audience believes should be true rather than that interpretation which the creator had originally intended to be perceived as true. Opposites in reality and in art do not have to oppose; they can see their differences yet still cooperate within the same journey.
We can break foils free from their tropes through applying to them that which we can observe about the closeted flexibility of tritones.
I believe that the word “tritone” in and of itself has too much of a negative connotation which may hinder its interpretation as a colorful sound rather than as a gross musical nuisance, at least to the average listener. If I were to call it by its enharmonic name, the augmented fourth, then the latter would be more passable as a musical element for the public ear simply because I did not call it a “tritone.” More significantly, the tritone was not formulated to be used primarily as a scary sequence of two notes that do not interact with one another within a melody. Chords relieve the tritone of its negative connotation and allow it to exist as it is meant to exist on its own terms, which is as a cog for the forward momentum of a musical work, whether it is atonal or a sonata. Musician Ben Levin has demonstrated that the tritone, alongside any other interval, can escape from its socially defined ugly personality and shine. He took a twelve-tone row, the one that you read in the introductory paragraph as a matter of fact, and created a beautiful melody and chord progression out of it; this melody included the tritone F-B.
Imagine writing a story in which the protagonist is F-man and F’s foil is B-man. Foils need an engaging conflict. In order to establish one, you first need to establish a tight, sturdy, descriptive background for all of the characters in your story. If you want to eliminate that negative connotation of the “stereotypical” protagonist-foil relationship in your story, and the dull good-versus-evil trope for your characters, you need to establish a context in which each of your characters can independently show their worth as round personalities rather than flat allegories. Your story is set in the world of F-man, like the key of F major, and the foil lives in the world of B-man as the tritone for the key of F major is B. However, the world of F-man and the world of B-man are not on opposite hemispheres just as F and B are not in different keys. Say that B-man lives near the tallest mountain in F-man’s village, and the mountain separates them yet not completely. In music, that mountain would be the other notes within the key of F major which fall between F and B; the notes accidentally make F and B sound even more dissonant against one another in comparison, yet within an original, revamped context, F and B can realize how remarkably akin their personalities are to one another despite their great differences in perspective. Remember that foils do not have to be polar opposites.
12tone describes the fully-diminished seventh chord as “tritones tapes to tritones.” Moreover, Jeffrey Perry, professor of Music Theory at the Louisiana State University School of Music describes three functions for the chord: the leading tone chord, the common tone chord, and the contrapuntal chord. This chord only has three unique roots (B, C, and C# or Db,) yet it can pivot into any of the twelve key signatures of Western music. It can be used in situations similar to those in which a dominant chord in a key is used to lead to the tonic (for example, from G major to C major in the key of C major.) The fully-diminished seventh chord can even be the tonic chord as it is for the harmonic minor scale; a tritone pair such as F and B can act as the tonic and dominant in the Locrian mode of a scale (such as B Locrian, in which B is the tonic and F is the dominant.)
There is a lesson to be learned from this chord. Even though the fully-diminished seventh chord has a theoretical limit when it comes to functional musical harmony due to its specifically coarse sound that “may not sound good in a more consonant piece” according to 12tone, it may have no artistic limit because music is what you make of music, no matter how many tritones or fully-diminished seventh chords it contains. Your story’s fully-diminished seventh chord is the way in which F-man and B-man seem unable to get along at first; this can lead into a situation in which F-man and B-man meet within one of at least thirty-six unique “dramatic situations.” The University of Vermont found “six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,” while Christopher Booker found seven basic plots and Georges Polti devised thirty-six. There may be more plot structures as far as the imagination is concerned, which means that you can take the conflict between F-man and B-man into as many original directions as you desire, just as you can aim the fully-diminished seventh chord into any key.
Of course, F-man and B-man do not have to be sworn enemies, but at the same time, they do not have to be the best of friends. Keep in mind that whenever you use a foil relationship in a story, no matter how interesting your context is, you are nevertheless using a literary trope. It is almost necessary to use this trope for a captivating series of events, as without it, your story risks blandness. While it is a trope, it still has dignity and can be used wisely. You can use the trope as a firm structure for your story’s plot and not as its own independent element that gambles with becoming overpronounced and clichéd. Adam Neely portrays the tritone as having a personality which can range anywhere from “yearning and hopeful” to “mischievous and playful.” In order to think further outside the trope, you can allude to all of your story’s possibilities and expand upon the roster of characters. Perhaps you can include a secondary conflict involving the characters G-man and A-man, the representations of the two whole steps which find themselves between F and B for the sake of the tritone. Maybe you can connect two foil relationships in your story to the primary one by introducing the characters D-man and G. Sharpman (this is the B fully-diminished seventh chord.) These exact options are trivial. The point is that you should and can consider how to properly use your trope. After all, even the flexible fully-diminished seventh chord should be used sparingly; using it too much weakens its power.
A resolution may be dispensable for your conflict. Blues music exploits the unresolved nature of tritones. This genre was a major catalyst for the bulk of rock and pop music. Plus, since there are so many possible avenues for the plot of F-man and B-man, perhaps the ending need not be written because it can be imagined just as well.
I hope that this discussion has helped you mold a creative foil relationship for your next story.
Works Cited:
12tone. (2016). Diminished 7th Modulations and the Swiss Army Pivot Chord. [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er6HLn6d05Y.
12tone. (2016). Diminished 7ths: Tritones Taped To Tritones. [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jLJHiff1B4.
12tone. (2016). What Makes Scary Music Scary?. [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhhHaya4YIE
ChangingMinds.org. (2002-2018). Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations. http://www.changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/polti_situations/polti_situations.htm.
Dictionary.com. (2018). Oxymoron. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/oxymoron.
Dodgson, L. (2018). It turns out opposites probably don't attract — here's why we like people who are similar to ourselves. Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-opposites-dont-attract-2018-3.
Fjeld, K. (2012). Modernist Fiction and the Appeal of Literary Characters: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo, pp.14; 19. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1024.5520&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Flood, A. (2016). Three, six or 36: how many basic plots are there in all stories ever written?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/jul/13/three-six-or-36-how-many-basic-plo ts-are-there-in-all-stories-ever-written.
flutetunes.com. (2018). Locrian Mode Scales. https://www.flutetunes.com/scales/locrian-scales.php.
Levin, B. (2018). Any Melody Can Be Awesome - Ben Levin. [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k82ds_xIZN0.
Little, A., Penton-Voak, I., Burt, D. and Perrett, D. (2003). Investigating an imprinting-like phenomenon in humans. Evolution & Human Behavior, 24(1), p.1 (Abstract). https://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(02)00119-8/fulltext.
Neely, A. (2017). The Devil in music (an untold history of the Tritone). [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5yzCH5CsM.
Paskale, P. (2017). Enemy, I Love You. Why Polar Opposites Power Storyline. The Huffington Post. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/enemy-i-love-you-why-pola_b_6028678.html.
Perry, J. (2018). 101 Things You Can Do With A Diminished Seventh Chord. Lsu.edu. https://www.lsu.edu/faculty/jperry/virtual_textbook/dim_7th.htm.
WarnerJordanEducation. (2015). Characterization - Foil Pairs. [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UfrxurYgeM.
Writing Explained. (2018). What is a Foil? Definition, Examples of Literary Foil Characters. https://writingexplained.org/grammar-dictionary/foil.
VanHooker, B. (2017). The ‘Mismatched Buddy Movie’ Is the Male Equivalent of the Rom-com. Mel Magazine. https://melmagazine.com/the-mismatched-buddy-movie-is-the-male-equivalent-of-the-rom-com73b0a1a36375.
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