Fiddling around

As a child prodigy, O'Connor decided to expand beyond classical violin.
By JOHN PATRICK GATTA
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
Mark O'Connor views his performance with the Youngstown Symphony as another opportunity in his quest to bring audiences a new type of American string music, one that is unafraid to combine the classical genre with other forms developed in this country.
"It's fun for me to appear with a symphony and to realize that at least half of the audience probably has not heard much about me," he said during a recent phone interview from his San Diego home.
"I approach it as a dual effort in that I want to perform for them as a violinist as well as introduce this new music style and composition to them in a way where they can check it out and see if they want to embrace my kind of music, which is American symphonic."
O'Connor acknowledged that the idea of doing this came to him soon after his music lessons expanded to include several styles. A child prodigy, he played classical and flamenco guitar. After watching Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw on the "Johnny Cash Show" in 1969, he instinctively knew that he wanted to learn that instrument as well.
Musical experimentation
"I was training on folk music and in jazz and in classical all by the time I was 13 years old. I started experimenting back then about how things interrelate and even a lot of my childhood concerts had a lot of variety, mixtures of sounds. Of course, I've refined those ideas over the years, but I think I had the notion of what I'm doing today even back when I was a young teenager.
"Wanting to explore a new kind of American string school, if you will, has evolved into a goal more recently after seeing the impact of my experimentation," he explained. "Originally, it was purely an artistic vehicle for me to express my music. It was a natural evolution in my own musical experience and my own life experience."
Winning national fiddle championships led the prestigious roots label, Rounder Records, to sign the 12-year-old O'Connor. He released three albums before his high school graduation in 1979. After stints playing with the David Grisman Quintet, Stephane Grappelli and the Dixie Dregs, O'Connor turned his sights to Nashville. There, he played on more than 400 albums.
Focused on composing
His desire to focus on his musical vision caused him to give up his lucrative career as a sideman. Instead, he concentrated on composing what would become his first classical album. "Fiddle Concerto" came out in 1994. Silencing any critics who viewed his work as a novelty, he followed that with seven more albums featuring his original scores.
His collaborations with acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma on several of them brought a wider recognition to O'Connor's style. He's also performed jazz tunes as a member of the Hot Swing Trio and revisited some of his compositions in a new ensemble, the Appalachia Waltz Trio, on the recently released "Crossing Bridges."
Mentor to the young
Hosting a fiddler camp for more than a decade, he has encouraged young musicians not to be confined by musical boundaries. "There are a number of young string players that are coming into the scene now that have really broadened the horizons of string music in this country," he said. "In a way, they're backing up the ideas that this can comfortably exist in the professional music realm."
Uniting the old with the new, he performed and recorded several concerts with young musicians who display an understanding through their own work of O'Connor's merging of American and classical traditions.
The career-spanning performances are captured on the two-disc set "Thirty-Year Retrospective."
"In doing research of my earlier albums, looking at them more carefully and rearranging them for the new ensemble, I could see things that were clearly a direct line to what I'm doing now in classical music," O'Connor said. "I thought that was probably the greatest revelation of that project, how all this whole thing fit together, that thread actually went through the whole thing."