Fargo, North Dakota

The Time Warner Cable-supplied blurb described the program as:

Conventional music used in a [sic] unconventional manner.

I wondered, what might that unconventional manner be, so I clicked on channel 83, the Ovation network.

It was Carter Burwell, describing the process of composing for Fargo, how he took a Norwegian folk song called The Lost Sheep, played around with it on his piano, then reshaped it with fiddle, pizzicato cello, double bass, harp and celeste using his computer and a few synthesizers. (It was rerecorded, of course, for the film).

Fargo, North Dakota.

I've always been drawn to the melancholy theme that seems to sum up the snowy expanse of the rural Dakotas. It was performed on a Hardanger fiddle by Paul Peabody.