Mark O'Connor has enjoyed such remarkable success at
every phase of his trackless career—from child fiddle champion
to jazz violinist to reigning Nashville session musician to acclaimed
classical composer and performer—that it almost seems he's being
perverse when he laughingly declares, "My entire musical life, I remember
adversity."
Talk of adversity may seem dubious from the man who
as a teenager won the National Old-Time Fiddler's Contest so often
he was asked to retire from the competition; whose compositions for
solo violin, "Caprices 1–6," set an Olympian standard of technical
mastery with their wrist-wrenching, knuckle-busting pyrotechnics;
and who at the beginning of this year was represented on three of
the top-selling classical CDs in the country and featured in a national
PBS-TV concert of his violin concerto, "The American Seasons."
For the 40-year-old O'Connor, though, the challenge
all along has been not in what he has been able to accomplish, but
in finding a musical setting broad enough to encompass the full range
of his artistry. From the very beginning, he chafed against having
his musical possibilities limited by his situation. As a child in
Seattle, he studied classical guitar for five years, adding flamenco
lessons (at his mother's instigation) near the end of his studies
as well. When he was ten, O'Connor's teacher prodded him into entering
a classical guitar competition at the University of Washington.
"I decided to do a switcheroo on my teacher and play
flamenco guitar in the competition, which I won. You can see a little
bit of the early Mark O'Connor in that," he laughs. You also can see
a little of O'Connor's preternatural virtuosity in the fact that he
won the competition not just in the youth division, but for all age
categories.
When, under the tutelage of a transplanted Texas fiddler
named Benny Thomasson, he fell in love with Texas fiddling two years
later, O'Connor again found himself out of sync, this time with the
Seattle-area fiddlers who played bluegrass or Canadian fiddle music.
"The fiddling scene around Seattle did not approve and
adopt me, and the Texans, who were very standoffish to anyone who
came from outside their borders, were extremely standoffish," he recalls.
"Once again I didn't fit in anywhere. I was this renegade kid by the
time I was 12 years old. That's what I knew."
By the time he graduated from high school in 1979, O'Connor
had recorded four of an eventual six traditional fiddle albums he
would make for Rounder Records. Over the next few years he moved from
legendary French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli's ensemble to the
jazz-rock group Dixie Dregs to Nashville session work, hearing at
each stop that his playing didn't conform to the style at hand.
That complaint might have been due to the fact that
whatever the situation, instead of sounding like a folk fiddler or
a jazz fiddler or a country fiddler, Mark O'Connor sounds like Mark
O'Connor. "I've kept to a central sound in my playing throughout,"
he says. "I've developed a style of playing that doesn't necessarily
change with the genre, but sort of lends itself to the genre. If I'm
playing with Yo-Yo Ma, or if I'm playing with Grappelli, or if I'm
playing with Johnny Gimble down in Texas, I don't know if my playing
changes that much—my bowing, my accents, my vibrato, my rhythm."
In 1989, O'Connor abandoned his lucrative career as
a session musician, burnt out by his workload and bored with the simple
structures of folk and country music. He wanted to compose, and in
fact had tried his hand at it once before. False Dawn, the last of
his recordings for Rounder, was written in its entirety before he
recorded it, and he played all the instruments himself. "If you listened
to that and you listened to 'American Seasons,' you can see that there's
not much difference going on," he says with a laugh.
Also concerned that his playing was being defined by
the rhythm sections accompaning him in his various musical undertakings,
O'Connor accordingly began to perform solo violin concerts, which
he continues to this day. "It really does take the jazz and the folk
element out of the setting, and the violin compositions come under
the microscope at that point where you have to have something carry
the music besides the rhythm section."
Going Solo
His solo concert work inspired him to compose the six-part
Caprices, which he finished in 1992. The technical demands of the
Caprices, which incorporate the breakneck tempos, thematic variations,
and polyphony of Texas fiddling, became a bridge for O'Connor to classical
music. "What I was doing was easily assimilated by the ear of a classical
musician," he explains. "That led right into my Fiddle Concerto [No.
1]. My idea was to create American rhythms and space with hyper-technical,
virtuosic writing."
"There had never been a violinist like Mark," observes
bassist Edgar Meyer, who collaborated with O'Connor and cellist Yo-Yo
Ma on the best-selling classical albums Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian
Journey. "He fundamentally was from outside classical music, but played
with the same level of accomplishment as people in classical music."
Despite entering the classical music realm from the
outside and having no formal classical music training, O'Connor soon
established himself as a composer. He premiered Fiddle Concerto No.
1 with the Santa Fe Symphony in 1993. "Fanfare for the Volunteer,"
his second concerto, was first performed in 1996 as part of the State
of Tennessee's Bicentennial celebrations. Three years later, O'Connor
recorded that work with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton
of Steven Mercurio. "The American Seasons," and "Double Concerto for
Two Violins" (which O'Connor premiered with violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Christoph Eschenbach conducting)
followed in 2000.
Like O'Connor's fiddle tunes, the calls for his compositions
seem to be accelerating rapidly. The Academy of St. Martin in the
Fields has commissioned his next concerto, for double violin and cello.
He also is scoring a ballet for modern dance choreographer Twyla Tharp
and a September 11 memorial mass for Gloriae Dei Cantores, the Massachusetts-based
choir for whom he recently completed his first choral work, "Let Us
Move."
"Now for the first time, I'm able to expand and open
up what I'm doing. The genre doesn't hold me back," he says enthusiastically.
"One thing I like to observe about Mark's trajectory
as a composer is how he sets such a high bar for himself," says Matt
Glaser, chairman of the string department of the Berklee College of
Music. Glaser has known O'Connor since he was 17 and O'Connor was
13. "In any project, you can hear his incredible development as a
composer from the previous project," Glaser says. "Every one of these
compositions brings a new element, a new mastery of approach, a new
mastery of forms. There's something ravenous in his technical genius
as a musician and his compositional genius. He's like the composer
who ate Minneapolis."
Though he has largely left the worlds of folk, jazz,
and country music behind him in concert and on record (he does still
record and perform with bassist Jon Burr and guitarist Frank Vignola
in the Hot Swing trio, however), O'Connor hasn't abandoned the music
itself. Instead, his classical compositions draw on the styles and
techniques he mastered in his earlier stages.
"There are what I would consider folk-like fiddle tunes
within 'The American Seasons' that are used as my main themes," he
says. "They're not material derived from the public domain, which
also makes my approach interesting, because I come up with my own
[folk] material. Theme and variations of folk fiddling are really
a centerpiece of how I develop these things. That goes right to my
Texas fiddling, arranging these old tunes, so that if I had a simple
fiddle tune with an AB form, I would create a C part by performing
the A part in variation. That's exactly what I'm doing in many of
my pieces in the classical setting, like 'The American Seasons.'
"On a microstructural level, I would take a phrase and
create variation among all the neighboring tones as a way to further
develop the material," he continues. "That's a very folk-like improvisational
technique. Once I create neighboring tones out of a motif, then that
could spin out and produce yet another episode of thematic material
in the piece. [Those are] things that I do that you can directly tie
into folk music and jazz form."
Explains Matt Glaser, "Mark has developed out of this
great rich tradition, has synthesized and brought to bear the best
elements of these different traditions. He's heir to a tradition,
but he's also a person who has pushed the boundaries of that tradition
by extending the creative base, by extending the level of technical
mastery. It gives the proper value to these folk traditions instead
of looking down one's nose at them."
Folk Fusion
To date, O'Connor's fusion of folk song and classical
form has had its greatest impact in the form of the Appalachia Waltz
and Appalachian Journey CDs, which featured Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer,
and O'Connor performing arrangements of original compositions and
such traditional fare as "College Hornpipe" and Stephen Foster's "Hard
Times." The trio realized they were on to something almost immediately
after beginning rehearsals in Nashville, where both O'Connor and Meyer
lived at the time, in 1995. On the second day, O'Connor suggested
they perform some of the material for a class he was teaching at Vanderbilt
University. "Our first audience was these 15 violinists in this class,"
he recalls. "By the time we were done, there was a whole line of these
teachers and students outside the hallway. I knew at that point that
this was going to be a bigger deal than normal," he says, laughing
again.
"In some ways, in what people might have thought of
as the unlikely pairing or grouping of these string players, it turned
out there was a lot more in common than was first realized. We want
to elevate the spirit, we want to stimulate the intellect, and we
want to strengthen the heart. You can get all bogged down in technique
and style and form and setting, but in the end, we all are artists
wanting to say something very similar."
"Classical music has had some issue with being off in
a corner on its own, whether for good or for bad reasons," Edgar Meyer
observes. "I think it's probably exciting for people in classical
music, or horrifying, but potentially exciting, especially for young
people, that it can be not old and dead, but that it can be connected
to other music in a very living and real way."
O'Connor, however, rejects the notion that his transition
from grassroots musical idioms to classical music concert halls makes
him a crossover artist. He reflects that when he first started composing,
the term largely referred to classical musicians, particularly singers,
performing pop music. "Also, crossover seemed to imply that somebody
was crossing over to a different genre to sell more records, and I
certainly wasn't doing that. I was maybe doing the reverse," he laughs.
"When your music falls in the cracks, like mine has almost since I
started playing, nobody knew where to put me," he continues. "They
didn't know what to do with me in junior high, then high school. I
always seemed to stick out from the defined genre. It's only been
more recently that I realized that this has been a journey of defining
another genre of music.
"If anybody looks at my music closely, they realize
that I'm not crossing over to anything. I'm extending what I do on
my instrument through my training, and I'm extending my compositions
from what I grew up listening to. It's really a culmination of musical
experiences, not crossing over from one to another."
An American
Model
The common thread of O'Connor's musical experiences
is that each has immersed him in a distinctly American genre of music,
and he sees himself as a distinctly American composer, one whose music
in particular is marked by an embrace of multiculturalism. "When you
listen to me, you can sense obviously a link to the Anglos, through
classical and Celtic music of Europe. You can also have a sense of
the Mexican folk songs and Mexican polkas through Texas fiddling.
You also have a sense of African-based blues, ragtime, and jazz in
my playing. I think that's very much an American model, to try to
get everybody involved. It's probably a resistance to classism, bringing
everybody to the table."
He is not, of course, the first American composer to
incorporate jazz, folk music, and even references to Appalachia into
his music, but O'Connor sees an important difference between his approach
and his most obvious predecessors. "I would think that people would
mention Copeland and Gershwin and Bernstein, all of whom have influenced
me as well," he acknowledges. "But what they have and I have steered
away from is this real European classical model of music making. It's
almost like I make music in a way that defies that the violin was
even related to Europe," he laughs yet again.
Despite the winding path that has taken O'Connor from
fiddling contests to concert halls, he's not surprised by where he
has found himself. His mother, he mentions, weaned him on classical
music, the only music in their home until he was eight or nine. Though
Yehudi Menuhin was her favorite violinist and O'Connor was inspired
to play fiddle by seeing Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw on television,
his mother encouraged her son's enthusiasm. "I took my own way, and
I think my mother really celebrated that," he says. "She died when
I was 20, so she never got to see where I ended up, but she did hear
the False Dawn project, and I remember her telling me that that kind
of creativity was in me and to keep pursuing it."
And so O'Connor sees his music as having come full circle.
"Even though I don't play like Yehudi Menuhin, I don't play like Benny
Thomasson, either," he says, and he laughs one more time.
Learn
more about Mark O'Connor at www.markoconnor.com.
Photo of Mark O'Connor by Kristoffersen.
