From a piece in The Harvard Crimson today:
"The refrain of one of my favorite songs goes,
'Tension is to be loved when it is like a passing note
to a beautiful, beautiful chord.' I don’t want to seek
the allusion [sic ] of finding balance anymore:
It can’t be found."
Allusion —
"No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan's spell"
— "American Pie"
A passing note —
"The name diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music")
has been applied to the interval from at least the
early 18th century…."
— Wikipedia on the tritone
See also Music & Noise at a physics site and the square root
of two on page 56 of Barry Mazur's Imagining Numbers
(Picador imprint, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) —
