It was the latent African rhythms in rock that frightened white suburban parents, perhaps fearful that the beat would induce a permanent, mindaltering trance in their innocent children. It was pitch that had the medieval church in an uproar.
This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer, and so the church named it Diabolus in musica. The church also banned the musical interval of an augmented fourth, the distance between C and F-sharp and also known as a tritone (the interval in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story when Tony sings the name “Maria”). The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. When Bob Dylan dared to play an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, people walked out and many of those who stayed, booed. I had friends when I was a kid in the sixties who used to come over to my house to listen to the Monkees because their parents forbade them to listen to anything but classical music, and others whose parents would only let them listen to and sing religious hymns, in both cases fearing the “dangerous rhythms” of rock and roll.
To one of my saxophone teachers at Berklee College of Music-and to legions of “traditional jazz” aficionados-anything made before 1940 or after 1960 isn’t really music at all.
What is music? To many, “music” can only mean the great masters-Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart.
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