Word: fiddlers
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Paganini: Caprices Nos. 1-12 (Ossy Renardy, violinist, Walter Roberts, pianist; Victor: six sides). Acrobatics recalling the composer-fiddler's centenary (TIME, June 10 ). A maybe for fiddle fans, a might-could for others...
...long, for his abnormally long arm - and four strings. A haughty showman, he employed unusually thin strings, not only to produce extremely delicate harmonics (overtones two octaves higher than normal), but also, said some, so that he could break a string, use the remaining three as makeshift. To the fiddler's bag of tricks, Paganini contributed the left-hand pizzicato (plucked note), the double harmonic, the staccato in which the bow is bounced on the strings. He could fiddle a barnyard scene, once awakened an inn with a lifelike rendition of a baby crying...
...people as possible see the scores from which he and his orchestra played in concert. At a rehearsal, he would indicate tempi, toss off a few notes of a cadenza, infuriate everyone by remarking "Et cetera, Messieurs," and knock off. During Paganini's life, the only way a fiddler could learn anything about his style was to listen in a concert hall. This was not much help: not for many years could anyone figure out how to play his best-known, most difficult works, the 24 Caprices...
...Fifty-five years ago and more, the writer hereof earned his first dollar playing for dances in Butler county, a young boy in his middle teens. We make no boasts but our outfit, consisting of a blind fiddler, a competent cornetist and deponent at the cabinet organ or piano, as the case happened to be-used to go out in the country to farm dances. . . . Mostly we played square dances, though we had two or three waltzes-'The First Kiss Waltz,' 'The Cornflower Waltz,' 'The Skaters' and 'Where, Oh Where, Has My Little...
...time, Grand Ol' Opry has coaxed out of the hills a great album of musty, hand-me-down folk songs. Some are fiddly old dances, like Tennessee Waggoner, Rabbit in the Pea Patch, Cross-Eyed Butcher, Give the Fiddler a Dram, Chittlin' Cookin' Time in Cheatham County. Others, plaintive and plunky like Maple on the Hill, Brown's Ferry Blues, Nobody's Darlin' but Mine, have gone on to wide juke-box favor. One recent find was a fine old Fundamentalist allegory called The Great Speckled Bird, probably inspired by Jeremiah...