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| Tritone--the Devil's Chord |
I've
noted before that I'm a musician, a guitarist (and I play banjo and mandolin)
and, as a result, much of my inspiration for stories comes from the world of music. I write
about musicians and their experiences; a lot of my stories relate to songs and
ballads. My story "The Seven Gates to Hell," came from the time I
went into a small book store and picked up a guitar magazine. Thumbing through
it, I encountered a full-page ad for a guitar player who seemed to be into some
sort of occultism. The ad mentioned magic and how it operated in our lives. He
was kind of a big guy with a beard and a shaved head and had shaped his hands
into a contorted chord form on the fretboard of the guitar he was holding.
Below him an advertisement for an LP (yes, they still had those in that day)
said something about "Opening the Seven Gates of Hell."
The
picture stuck in my mind, for some reason. Years later—quite a few years later—the
idea for a story based on what I had seen and thought about it developed. I
resurrected my old ongoing character, Sossity Chandler, since it would be a
story about musicians. Sossity had fallen by the wayside in my writing career
by that time. She had appeared in "Innerspace," which I thought was a
good story (and got published in a high-class journal) and as a minor character
in "Jergen Kouhaut's Blues." But for some reason, I had written
stories about other things and not about her. This story, however, suggested
Sossity: her sharp, brooding energy, her
expertise as a musician, and her success as a pop star.
She
remembers seeing a picture (similar to the one I saw) when she first started
playing at age 13 and sends her personal assistant to find a copy of the
magazine. Her assistant manages to do this and Sossity starts trying to find information
on the person in the advertisement. His name is Marius Cumberland from
Illinois. She manages to contact someone who knew him, obtains a copy of his
old cassette tape, has her tech people transfer to CD, and listens:
The
music was a little creepy, she reflected, with lots of dissonances, chord
jumps, distortion and inversion. She noted that he used the augmented fourth, which
in the Middle Ages was called diabolus in musica—in fact, she noted, he used it so much its repetition annoyed her. The
Devil’s music, she thought, the tritone formation that was actually banned in
the by the Church back then. Obviously he wanted to invite the devil along on
his musical journey down the seven paths. She admired his rapid-fire riffs,
savvy improvs, the chord combinations and tonalities he achieved. But in all of
this she got no sense of the Seven Paths to Hell. Music, she reflected,
smacking her lips as she enjoyed a good glass of Traminette, militated against
evil and hell by its very nature. Despite what medieval theologians who
detected the devil in a chord structure or TV evangelists who said rock music
rolled to Satan’s rhythm might believe, music created beauty and form. Trying
to make music evil was a herculean task—maybe it could be done, but if anyone
had succeeded doing this she had never heard the finished product. And Marius
Cumberland had certainly not achieved anything like this. The fact that his music
gave her pleasure and not pain proved as much.
Sossity's idea of what constitutes evil is
conditioned by things she has read and learned. True evil militates against
pleasure. She rejects Renaissance idea that evil is liberating. She believes
in "the banality of evil." People she knew who tried to be evil—and she
had a few friends who had become occultists or anarchists—were generally
tacky, ridiculous, and deluded. Evil did not empower, it desiccated. It disabled
the human spirit. There was nothing enlightening or emancipating about it.
She eventually makes contact with Marius (whose
real name is Mark) and meets him at Dayton, Ohio, when she plays a fund-raising
concert there. The years have changed him. He does not look so sinister now. He
looks old and shrunken. She asks him if he is still into occultism and magic.
He says no, tells her he has gone back to the nominal Mormon religion of his
younger days and had to spend many years undoing the damage his involvement in
occultism had done. It had split up his marriage. He worked now as a postal
clerk and did not play guitar much. She arranges to re-release his tape, though
she suggests a different title—something to which he agrees. She later reflects
on the nature of music, good, and evil.
The story appeared in Ranfurly Review, which
has ceased publication but has an archive. Here is a link to "The Seven Paths to Hell." (Note: it is a PDF file, so you will have to scroll down to page 40 in the text.)
For more reading in this vein, check out my latest book, Le Cafe de la Mort. Coffee to die for served up by the Angle of Death.
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