Another interval that the musicians of the modal era took great pains to avoid was the augmented fourth (the tritone, or "devil in music"), an interval containing three whole steps, as between F and B the whole steps F G, G A, and A B.
Even while completing his education, Messiaen adopted a series of modes, contemporary riffs on the ancient ones, with repetitive patterns of half steps and whole steps throughout the scale.
The sets of strings on each bridge are pitched whole steps apart and neighbouring sets of strings on adjacent bridges are pitched a fifth apart; this arrangement enables a musician to play a chromatic scale in all keys.
Instead, Cohen tuned the strings on his guitar down two whole steps, so, for instance, the low E was now a low C. Cohen had always had a deep, intimate voice, but now, with age, and after countless cigarettes, it is a fantastical growl, confiding, lordly.
With an orchestra of around 20 pieces, a 17-member choir and a tabla player, as well as the full band (minus Mr. Coltrane), the music amounted to fairly simple gospel-soul, agreeably modulating upward in whole steps; the religious lyrics were in Hebrew, Sanskrit and Aramaic.
Even the most seemingly original music in "Trionfo," Orff's imaginary equivalent of the lascivious Greek "chromatic genus" (to which he sets the bride and groom's lines), turns out to be a Stravinsky surrogate, derived from the scale of alternating half and whole steps that Stravinsky inherited from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who got it from Liszt.
