Pioneer Specials

The Devil’s Instrument is a new documentary by Pioneer PBS, captured during a 10-day trip to Norway in August 2019. The film explores the culture surrounding the Hardanger fiddle and interviews woodworkers who make the fiddle, the musicians who play it and the dancers who spin to it against the backdrop of the gorgeous Norwegian landscape.

Artists James Star Comes Out and Keith Braveheart of the Oglala Lakota tribe of South Dakota and Dakota Wicohan collaborated with Pioneer PBS to create this documentary. Follow the difficult path Native people and their horse relatives traversed, as foreigners settled the surrounding lands and learn how the Dakota people of Minnesota are working to keep their cultural identity thriving.

In Sympathetic Strings, a film by Pioneer PBS, meet fiddle makers, musicians, dancers and apprentices from throughout Minnesota who form a passionate, close-knit community of folk tradition practice surrounding the Hardanger fiddle.