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):
Musical works using the chromatic fourth or passus duriusculus
^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.
ISBN978-0-07-310188-0.