A recent article in USA Today discusses controversies over church worship music. David Cloud, a Baptist pastor who created a web directory of independent Baptist churches who pledge to use only the King James Version of the Bible and eschew contemporary music, is quoted as saying: “There is an intense war being waged today for the heart and soul of Bible-believing churches, and one of the Devil’s most effective Trojan horses is music.”

People talk a lot about the devil in relation to music. Blues great Robert Johnson was said to have struck a deal with the devil. In exchange for his soul he was given a mastery of the blues. The thing that strikes me odd about that story is I would think that if one were to bargain away one’s soul one would ask for more than that. Johnson did become a brilliant musician but died young, poor and relatively unknown. Seems he got the short end of the bargain.

Several genres of music, all of which I’m a huge fan, have been labeled as “the devil’s music.” Over the years, blues, rock and hip hop have been blamed for immorality, violence and cultural decay. Yet, most fans of these genres have managed to lead pretty decent lives.

One of my favorite myths about the devil and music involves the tritone. A tritone is a musical interval that spans 3 whole notes, from C to F# for example, producing a very dark, dissonant sound. Listen to the beginning of Hendrix playing “Purple Haze” and you will hear tritones:

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Heavy metal icon Ronnie James Dio — front man of Rainbow, the second incarnation of Black Sabbath, and of course Dio — has died. He was 67.

In addition to his work with these legendary bands, Dio is widely credited with popularizing — but not inventing — one of rock’s signature “theological” gestures during his time with Black Sabbath: the “devil horns.” It is a gesture that has, of course, transcended metal, entering rock cultures generally as well as popular culture throughout the world.

From a 2001 interview with Dio:

“I want to ask you about something people have asked you about before but will no doubt continue to talk about, and that is the sign created by raising your index and little finger. Some call it the “devils hand” or the “evil eye.” I would like to know if you were the first one to introduce this to the metal world and what this symbol represents to you?”

R.J. Dio – “I doubt very much if I would be the first one who ever did that. That’s like saying I invented the wheel, I’m sure someone did that at some other point. I think you’d have to say that I made it fashionable. I used it so much and all the time and it had become my trademark until the Britney Spears audience decided to do it as well. So it kind of lost its meaning with that. But it was…I was in Sabbath at the time. It was symbol that I thought was reflective of what that band was supposed to be all about. It’s NOT the devil’s sign like we’re here with the devil. It’s an Italian thing I got from my Grandmother called the “Malocchio”. It’s to ward off the Evil Eye or to give the Evil Eye, depending on which way you do it. It’s just a symbol but it had magical incantations and attitudes to it and I felt it worked very well with Sabbath. So I became very noted for it and then everybody else started to pick up on it and away it went. But I would never say I take credit for being the first to do it. I say because I did it so much that it became the symbol of rock and roll of some kind.”

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A few years ago, I was happy to learn about “Sabbatum,” an album released in 2003 by an Estonian ensemble called Rondellus who specialize in medieval musics. “Sabbatum” is — hold tight — a “medieval tribute to Black Sabbath.”

This is a high-concept album rendered delicately and with brio. The musicians (who have also recorded medieval songs about the Rosary and the saints), achieve something splendid: a simultaneous extraction and invention of an early-music quality (indeed, more than quality, almost “inspiration”) in a dozen Black Sabbath tunes. Did I mention that they are also sung in Latin?

What I particularly enjoy about this project is the rhetorical/cultural “elevation” of rock effected by such a transposition; the respect for the “premodern” in rock (which reminded me of a very interesting book on Romanticism in rock by Robert Pattison from twenty years ago, titled The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 1987)); and the soundish evocation of a Catholic atmosphere for myself and no doubt many other listeners, who with “Sabbatum” gain the imaginative space of a nest of symbolic/emotional associations for hearing rock anew (one can easily imagine “Post Aeternitatum / After Forever” being chanted in a monastery).

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