FIVE AUDIO TRACKS!! [caption id="" align="alignright" width="191" caption="The devil as violinist"][/caption] I recently produced a feature for Morning Edition on fiddle playing and fiddle contests, occasioned by the 2009 Ohio State Fiddling Contest that takes place this Friday at the historic Stuart's Opera House in Nelsonville. In my work on this feature I was reminded of the importance of the Charlie Daniels Band's now iconic 1979 hit "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" in developing fiddle playing's popular appeal beyond players and fans of folk and old-time music. I'm sure you know the song, but here's a bit of the beginning to jog your memory: [audio:devil_georgia1.mp3] I was also reminded of this song's place in the great tradition of musical works inspired by legends of the Devil-as-violinist. I thought I'd explore this topic--far too vast and rich for a blog post--in a blog post. Though not chronologically correct, let's start with Charlie Daniels. I could go on and on about the dramatic depth of this fabulous song. The text is a ballad and tells the story of a fiddle contest the Devil initiates with a young fiddler named Johnny. This text has all the ingredients of great literature: clear character motivation (the Devil is "running behind" in his quest to acquire souls to serve his evil agenda), conflict (the Devil challenges Johnny to a fiddle contest, and Johnny has to do something to disentangle himself, or else the story's over), plot development (the contest takes place, during which we learn, among other things, that a "band of demons" sounds like funky rhythm guitar), and denouement (in which Johnny wins the Devil's fiddle contest and presumably also the golden fiddle the Devil used to entice him to compete. There's even a (very cool-sounding) passage of text that, I would argue, serves one of the functions that the chorus in ancient Greek drama served: to comment on the main themes underlying the action of the drama. This passage is the only portion of the song's text that addresses Johnny directly ("Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard/'Cause hell's broke loo0se in Gerogia and the devil deals it hard/And if you win you get this shiny fiddle made of gold,/But if you lose the devil gets your soul") and through it, the "chorus" spurs on the action by encouraging Johnny's next move while at the same time making the stakes clear for the listener. This passage is also the first passage in the song in which Daniels sings with his back-up vocalists--a chorus, no? And this song's music is more than just high-octane, foot-tappin' fun. I particularly like the diabolically out-of-tune effect of the fiddle solo in the introduction, more specifically in the upward scale that isn't a major scale, isn't quite a minor scale, isn't quite a Greek mode: [audio:devil_georgia2.mp3] This scale almost sounds as though the fiddle is tuned to non-standard tuning so as to be able to produce this deliciously evil sound. The practice of tuning stringed instruments to unusual pitch levels has been used in notated Western music since at least the seventeenth century, and the Italians--ever sensitive to matters of aesthetics--called it what we still call it today: scordatura (literally, "mistuning"). More on this and its diabolical associations later. Hearing "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" after many years made me think of all the great works of classical music that deal with the Faustian theme of selling one's soul to the Devil, and that, more specifically, use the violin to represent the Devil's music. A random assortment of works comes immediately to mind. After a suspiciously sweet-sounding introduction in the piano, Saint-Saens' Danse macabre continues with a violin playing repeated tritones, an interval known in the Middle Ages as diabolus in musica--the Devil in music--for its inherent volatility and strident sound. Here are violinist Jean-Jacques Kantorow and pianist Jacques Rouvier on their aptly named Seduction of Violin recording: [audio:danse_macabre.mp3] There is scordatura in this work. Saint-Saens instructs the violinist to tune the instrument's highest string down from E to Eb. This retuning allows the violinist to play the opening tritones (A-Eb) on open strings, which produce a brighter, more strident sound than does a string pressed down by a finger. Stepping back to the early nineteenth century, the violinist Niccolo Paganini was famously believed to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for technical virtuosity on the violin the likes of which Europe had not previously seen. A random survey of Paganini's violin compositions illustrates his command of the instrument. Here's an excerpt from his 24th Caprice for solo violin, itself a theme and variations set that makes the player (in this case, Itzhak Perlman) run the gauntlet of technical wizardry: [audio:paganini_caprice24.mp3] A great diabolical piece of the twentieth century is Stravinsky's L'Historie du Soldat, in which a soldier, playing his violin while enjoying some time on leave, gives his violin to the Devil in exchange for a book that promises him untold wealth. The soldier gives the devil violin lessons (certainly he didn't need them) in exchange for the Devil's instructions on how the soldier should use the book. To make a long story short, lots of water goes over the dam, and eventually the Devil wins the soldier and his violin for keeps. In "The Devil's Triumphant March" at the end of the piece, a transfixed Johnny follows the violin-playing Devil down perhaps the same "hot and dusty road" on which the soldier began his journey.  Violinist Paul Shure protrays the Devil on this recording: [audio:stravinsky_soldat_march.mp3] By the time the Canadian filmmaker Francois Girard created The Red Violin (1998), the idea of a violn-playing devil had long been established in the Western mind. Girard's film charts the course of a seventeenth-century Cremonese-made violin, whose maker paints it with the blood of his wife to grieve her death in childbirth. The film also charts to course of those who, through the centuries, play the instrument. The score's composer, John Corigliano, also composed The Red Violin chaconne for violin and orchestra. Violinist Joshua Bell played the score's violin part for the film, and has also recorded the chaconne. Here he is playing a the chaconne: [audio:red_violin_chaconne.mp3] One of The Red Violin's more compelling episodes involves the exploits--sexual and otherwise--of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist clearly drawn to resemble the Paganini of myth and legend. This may be as close as any of us ever get to experiencing the real Paganini, his extraordinary talent and the eccentric ways about him that may have given rise to the stories about him as an agent of Lucifer. At least I hope it is, for if Paganini were the devil's porter on earth, where might he be now? For that matter, this may be as close as any of us ever get to experiencing the devil's musical prowess.  I, for one, plan to admire his music--the works I've mentioned and the legions of works I have not--from afar: over the classical music public radio airwaves during my brief moment on this earth, and from my personal encampment on the Elysian Fields once I've moved on. --Jennifer Hambrick
The Fiddle is a Devil of an Instrument
