In music theory, a chromatic fourth, or passus duriusculus,[2] is a melody or melodic fragment spanning a perfect fourth with all or almost all chromatic intervals filled in (chromatic line). The quintessential example is in D minor with the tonic and dominant notes as boundaries:
The chromatic fourth was first used in the madrigals of the 16th century.[citation needed] The Latin term itself—"harsh" or "difficult" (duriusculus) "step" or "passage" (passus)—originates in Christoph Bernhard's 17th-century Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (1648–49), where it appears to refer to repeated melodic motion by semitone creating consecutive semitones.[2] The term may also relate to the pianto associated with weeping.[2] In the Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach used it in his choral as well as his instrumental music, in the Well-Tempered Clavier, for example (the chromatic fourth is indicated by the red notes):
This does not mean that the chromatic fourth was always used in a sorrowful or foreboding way, or that the boundaries should always be the tonic and dominant notes. One counterexample comes from the Minuet of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's String Quartet in G major, K. 387 (the chromatic fourths are conveniently bracketed by the slurs and set apart with note-to-note dynamics changes):
^Benward, Bruce, and Marilyn Nadine Saker. 2009. Music in Theory and Practice, p.216. Eighth edition. 2 vols. + 2 CD sound discs. Boston: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-310188-0.
^ abcMonelle, Raymond (2000). The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays, p.73. ISBN 978-0-691-05716-3.
^Williams, Peter (1998). The Chromatic Fourth: During Four Centuries of Music, p.69. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816563-3.
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