I'm home after posting grades and surviving a drive through freezing drizzle that coated the leading half of my car with half an inch of ice. In surfing the internet, I re-found the most wonderful, the best, rendition of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen recorded, by Jeff Buckley (with no-doubt intentionally ironic use of the tritone in the instrumental interludes), on the only major label album released in the man's lifetime, before he drowned in the Mississippi River on my birthday over ten years ago.
The only person who's come even close to this is k d lang, in a live performance, sung for the Alberta centennial four years ago. The song in question comes in at about a third of the way through at 4:30 (with some slight synch delay):
It's one of the most transcendent sad songs written. And, having seen k d lang in Seattle in 1987, she's one of my major singing influences, for what little that's worth...
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Hey Dave, I don't know about music enough to understand ironic tritones. What are they? (I've always liked Jeff Buckley, but the friend that introduced me to his music introduced it by handing me the CD and saying this: Listen to it once. You'll probably hate it, but wait a month and listen to it againt. You might dislike it, but wait another month and listen to it again. After a while it'll be one of your favorite albums. I did, and it is.)
Those Tritones were called, in early times, the "Devil in Music," and was forbidden to be played. In the Buckley song, the tritone is the unsettling chord you hear after the first two notes. That interval shows up time and again. Considering the name of the song and its heavy biblical borrowings, it seems a conscious ironic choice...
That seems to fit in with the opening lyrics.
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