Chromatic fourth

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] 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):

Chromatic run from Chopin's Prelude in C Minor, mm.5-6. [ 1 ] Play ⓘ
Lament bass from Vivaldi 's motet "O qui coeli terraeque serenitas" RV 631, Aria No. 2 [ 3 ] In operas of the Baroque and Classical, the chromatic fourth was often used in the bass and for woeful arias, often being called a " lament bass ". In the penultimate pages of the first movement of Beethoven 's Ninth Symphony , the chromatic fourth appears in the cellos and basses. Play ⓘ .
In the organ chorale prelude BWV 614, there are chromatic fourths in the three accompanying voices