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Not everyone can communicate without words. Getting meaning, feeling and narrative across using nuance and texture instead of defined syllables is beyond the grasp of many musicians. Yet, Mark O'Connor has always told vivid tales with his violin and compositions. From his early pithiness as a Nashville session hot shot through innumerable award winning projects in the jazz, bluegrass and classical fields, O'Connor has shown himself a remarkable storyteller, eliciting laughs, scares and sighs with ease, a wordless screenwriter who's thrilling and calming by turns and never wants for emotional oomph.
Since first rising to prominence as a teenage national champion on fiddle, as well as guitar and mandolin, in the early 1970s, O'Connor has remained an active, hugely diverse voice in American music, predictably high quality at all times but unpredictable in every other respect. Where one release may find him sculpting a folk mass, another may be a series of intimate duets or art-ed up mountain music. His large group works in recent years reveal an even more exhaustively vigorous and musically authoritative mind than even his ridiculously laudatory career had already hinted at. Beyond being a superb soloist and violinist of the first order, O'Connor the composer possesses a brilliance that harnesses some of the playful wit of Carl Stalling, the melodic dexterity of Duke Ellington, the brainy conceptualizing of Charles Mingus, the ingenious arranging skill of Gil Evans and the heat and speed of Louis Armstrong, all incongruously yet perfectly touched by immigrant folk elements and hillbilly spirit. In Mark O'Connor's work we find just about all the sweet meat of American music stirred to utter perfection.
On March 10, 2009, the man who once garnered “Musician of the Year" honors six years running (1991-1996) from the Country Music Association released his first symphony, Americana Symphony: Variations On Appalachia Waltz (OMAC Records). Conducted by Marin Alsop and performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra it is a moving, evocative, tremendously ambitious addition to the modern classical canon and further confirmation of the admiration and creative fellowship he's enjoyed with contemporary masters like Yo Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer, as well as further evidence that the guy can handle and excel at everything from salty sailor reels to swing jazz to commercial country and every damn thing in between and beyond.
Mark O'Connor sat down for a lengthy discussion of his symphony and some of the many roads that lead to its creation. We are honored to share a slice of his time and certainly learned a thing or twelve about music in the larger sense and American music in particular in our talk with him.
JamBase: The natural place to begin is with the new symphony. As a non-musician, I find the whole concept of trying to compose something of that scope, that scale, something you give to that many other people to realize, just daunting as hell. How did you approach writing your first symphony?
Mark O'Connor: It is a daunting task, and more than that, it's something many composers never really get to, for various reasons. One is the undertaking of this kind of thing is very long and by the time you have the talent and technique and experience to do something like this often people are very busy in their lives. What I had to do was set aside a lot of things. My other output and my career, in some ways, kind of suffered for taking this year off, and even my playing took a backseat. At one point, I literally hung up the violin for a couple months just to try to get this going and actually finish it. I started in with some trepidation but feeling like I could handle it based on the six concertos I'd composed before. And about halfway through the symphony I realized what an undertaking it was, having the whole orchestra be the sole voice that communicates the musical idea to the audience.
JamBase: That's very different to the soloist mentality of bluegrass and a lot of the other music you've played.
Mark O'Connor: You're right, I've been a soloist my entire life [laughs].
In your professional career you've been brought in a lot for session work, which is very spot-specific, where your instrument is brought into the context of this other thing already in progress. This is the diametric opposite of that, where you're letting it all go to a lot of other players.
I was gaining confidence in the last 20 years in my composing abilities, and I think this was a way to put it on the line and really assess myself as a composer apart from being a dynamic soloist/composer.
I wanted to pick your brain a bit about the title, Americana Symphony. What are the characteristics of Americana as it applies to symphonic work? What are the American characteristics that come into this very European model?
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Well, metaphorically it can be a proper usage for many different things in different genres and art forms. So, I looked at the scope of the symphony as creating a story or a film or a novel or an expansive painting or a series of photographic portraits, something like that where the symphony becomes American in how I was going to treat it. And the violin is also European but given the proper context, pulling in from the language of American culture, is what I was out to do.
For a number of years I've been creating this philosophy of what American music is. It started from a lot of people from the classical community asking me what it is, and over the years I've created different parts of this story - so to speak, the American Story - musically through my compositions. “Appalachia Waltz" itself is part of that story. It reflects the journey in one part of it and the feeling of the wide-open spaces in another part. So, I take the wide-open spaces, the journey and the melting pot culture as the three major influences into the making of an American musical art form.
I think with a symphony I was really able to bring in and distill these influences and cultural examples that inform our American language. So, when you look at say bluegrass music or rock 'n' roll or Appalachian fiddling or blues, almost all of these types of music are fed from these same kinds of cultural aspects - the journey, the melting pot and the wide-open spaces, both physically and metaphorically meaning there's a better day ahead.
Absolutely, that sort of westward expansion as metaphor as much as a literal thing, that movement into the unknown. There's a lot of things that are very lovely about the American Spirit, and I think your symphony touches on a lot of them. I think my favorite section, though this shifts with each listen, is the third movement, “Different Paths Towards Home," where the delicacy of the beginning is sort of flipped for the grandness at the end. That range speaks volumes about American music and the American Ideal, the ability to be quiet and thoughtful but also the ability to be quite loud when we want to be.
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I know, and also I visually see this sort of starting place in the mountains along the East Coast, and how we branched out to the North and to the South as we went over West. And the fugue, the writing technique I used in that movement, really plays itself out well with that kind of visual backdrop. Everybody has a similar goal but different ways to get there. So, the connecting phrases of “Appalachia Waltz" pull that concept together and the fugal nature of the composition makes it expansive.
I love that you hone in on the idea that instrumental music can still be a storytelling medium. That's not always understood very well, especially as we've become so verbal as a culture and our popular music has become so verbal and aggressive.
One of the things I noticed as a big void in classical music, from the American perspective, is that there's been 300 years pretty much ignored from the classical music establishment of cultural music from America.
It's weird to hear you say that out loud because that's sort of the ghost in the room.
Exactly, and we have to give credit that in maybe the past few generations there've been some kind of cross-pollination, especially with jazz and more recently with pop music. But what's interesting about this whole thing is in the last 100 years, or less even, maybe the last 60 or 70 years, vocal music has been prominent in our culture and the 300 years before that were more instrumental. When I give my clinics at some point I always hold up the violin to the audience and say, “The entire American history can be told on this instrument."
That's stunning that an object you can hold in your hand has that capacity for conveying history. That's a powerful thing. I still view instruments, particularly the violin, as magic objects, something deeper than meets the eye/ear that taps the unseen world beyond its resonance as a physical object.
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I think that's one of the reasons I was drawn towards the violin, because I could feel that history in the instrument and the story it tells us about how we got here. I always think that music is a good thing for kids to learn so they can better understand their history. But in this case [the symphony], the American music themes - the fiddle tunes that have been passed down, the development of all the idiomatic languages of cultural music in America - is something I'm very familiar with. I'm familiar with almost all of them and performed many of them, a lot of them professionally, and I've had access to them, even as a child.
So, you have this intimacy with this core catalog that floats in the instrument in America.
And that was what I wanted to bring to the symphony. There's a lot of composers out there that can write a symphony, and I have friends that graduated from Princeton and Yale, and they majored in composition and they're writing a symphony or a couple of them! So, it's not that unusual in itself but what I wanted to do was try to create a real American music. I've been able to do that on my violin because I trained, I learned from the best and immersed myself over the years in styles of American violin music, but what I wanted to figure out was could I make that correlate to the symphony orchestra through my own American themes.
I think you succeed, but I also think it's hard for any American composer to approach the symphonic form and not emulate what we already identify as American Symphonic Music, i.e. Aaron Copeland. But, I don't get the sense that you're echoing what's already been done in this field. I'm not schooled enough to say exactly how it differs but it feels different.
Copeland is a great master to talk about for me because how I ended up doing this was waiting for a point in my life where I can not only admire Copeland but not be afraid of him. Meaning that I'm not afraid to sound like him because I probably won't [laughs].
I think at that point, where an artist achieves that kind of individuality, that's where the music can just come unbridled and ideas can flow and there's no kind of carefulness about impeding on someone else's work. I experience those kinds of things as an instrumentalist, where at some point I wonder, “Am I too careful not to become Benny Thomasson or Stephane Grappelli [uber-influential violinists and O'Connor's personal mentors] or am I going to get as close as I can to them but not fear that I will sound like a second Thomasson or second Grappelli?"
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That's the danger for people who've studied with real masters like that. You had direct contact with those guys. You do want to avoid being a copyist. I think anybody who plays music wants to avoid that. But, I like what you're saying about there coming a point where you have to stop worrying that you could even do that.
That's right. It comes to a point where you build that kind of confidence in yourself. I started developing this as an instrumentalist. People can actually hear this take place on my Heroes album from 1992. Here's a case where I was actually trying to sound like my heroes, trying to inhabit the earlier Mark O'Connor as a child, as an apprentice to these great players, and this album wasn't about me saying, “Here's the Mark O'Connor style." The whole concept was me trying to emulate them, and as close as I got to them - which in some cases was very close [laughs] - in the end people identified me as having a style, and I could see that, too. That was really the launching of my solo career. I felt for the first time that I was individual enough to have a career in music as a soloist.
That's got to be a powerful thing to get under your belt. You'd been at it, at least professionally, about 20 years at that point.
Yes, and even though I'd perhaps had my own style right from the beginning, I wasn't necessarily comfortable with myself, comfortable in the shoes I walked in. And I think to be a very prolific artist and a confident one you have to, at some point, feel comfortable with what you do and who you are. Now, looking back, I had my own fiddle style when I was 13-years-old; there's nobody else that sounds like that. But, it wasn't as much about the facts taking place on the ground as about how I was projecting myself forward. With each era of growth in my own output I realized I didn't need to be chasing my tail, I just needed to go forward.
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Confidence isn't a bad thing. Maybe sometimes it gets a bad rap, chalking it up to ego, but the best musicians I've met - Bill Frisell, Phil Lesh, Chris Thile - ultimately reveal a person and a player that's totally himself. And that flows through the music and their instrument when you get somebody that's fully coming into their individuality. And you can't do that without confidence.
Yeah, you certainly can't. I think one of my strong points is my musical ideas. I have a lot of them, but it really does take a certain confidence to see the majority of those ideas through. Once in a while an idea can be manifested and developed just by circumstance or by someone else aiding you, and those things will happen, but to be consistently putting things out there, developing groups, band leading and composing in all these different genres you really have to develop a certain amount of confidence that you can pull these projects off.
The diversity of your career is also not easy to pull off. There's a tendency - even an encouragement - in music to specialize these days, to get comfortable in whatever niche you've managed to find for yourself. You could very easily be just a classical composer or a hot swing jazz musician, but that wouldn't allow room for your more bluegrass-tinged stuff or the country music you've done. The musicians I find myself most drawn to tend to be iconoclasts, people that don't fit in obvious molds. But, that diversity is challenging and a lot harder to market [laughs].
It is challenging, and at first I gave record companies fits, always falling “through the cracks." But I realized I not only loved the cracks but I liked standing on the edge of the cracks. The notion that you're falling into a crack is not a good one, it's a negative one. However, I felt like I was close enough to the crack where I could hold my head high, and I started thinking about how musical environments meet, and the exact point of where they meet could be termed a “crack," some kind of crevice, some kind of treacherous place, a dangerous place, and what are you going to do with this meeting of these two environments? And I enjoyed that visualization of me standing on the edge of one environment and reaching my hands and arms across to the other side and grabbing something I needed from the second environment. When I was finally able to articulate that, not only verbally but more importantly musically, that's when I started making a living on the cracks in my career.
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As a consequence of that, starting to spread the news that other people have done this before, a lot of people, certainly my heroes did something like this. And rather than deal with the term “crossover" I changed it to “cross-pollinator."
Cross-pollination is such an exciting, active description that carries the sense of something coming into being.
You can really make that work. Now, for my Heroes recording, which was a collection of pieces, I realized that while each of my heroes represented an amazing style, say L. Shankar from India or Jean-Luc Ponty from France with modern jazz, I realized that I'm the recipient of their collective legacies, and that gave birth to my [string] camp.
The idea of mentoring and traditions being handed on to future generations is part and parcel of your career.
I never really had the desire to be a full-time teacher or a teacher that had a studio of students. But, what I thought I could do was structure a camp where I could address a lot of people at once. And then I developed this concept that classical, jazz, folk music and world music could all live and thrive at a single camp where students could partake in all of these things. Before my camp that was unheard of.
It seems like it would be a very exciting thing to see unfold.
With each year there's more and more students coming that are familiar with this concept, though we still get students that are previously only familiar with one of these things. And it is really amazing to see what transforms in their minds throughout just those five days. By the end of the week they're just absolutely loving being there. At the beginning of the week they might feel nervous or overwhelmed, and at some point something kicks in for them. And the camp is really set up for magic like that to happen.
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I think with the world as it exists today, cross-pollination is the way of music. The mercury quick access to music, not just from other countries but other time periods in other countries and our own, is amazing. Not long ago I found myself absorbed with '60s Turkish psychedelic music. Today, one can wander into these strange pockets one couldn't have imagined encountering even a few decades ago.
You're right in that this cross-pollinating idea has been around for a long time, it's been around for centuries. The fact that we have to keep bringing it up and further pushing this sort of thing forward is a very interesting predicament. But, as I said, all my teachers and mentors were all cross-pollinators. Grappelli himself cross-pollinated across five different musical environments to find what we know Grappelli is. It's classical music, jazz music from America, tango music from Argentina, the French art cafe environment in Paris and gypsy music that he got from Django. He took those five ingredients and rolled them up into Grappelli. And I can go down that list with almost any mentor I have.
Speaking of cross-pollinators, one of your most striking and memorable musical relationships is with Yo Yo Ma, who you've performed and recorded with as well as seen him perform your work on his own. You are one of the only composers still breathing that's a regular part of his repertoire. There's something beautiful about your connection with him, where your music, even when you're not on stage with him, has become part of what he does.
When I first got with Yo Yo Ma he came to my house in 1994 or 95 to experiment with some music I was writing, that was when I first showed him “Appalachia Waltz." It's very interesting because I feel like my music is closer to him than I ever could be. When you think about that kind of relationship with a living person being a composer it is very interesting.
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Yo Yo was a great, great student of this music from the beginning, and then, of course, he mastered it and perfected it, obviously. But one of the very interesting things was our first conversation, because in his curiosity about what I was doing and who I was he was trying to make sense of it. And he was using parallels to the classical environment and I started talking to him about how American music was developed, and he said, “Tell me the greatest example of fiddle music in America." And I would talk about Benny Thomasson, and I'd tell him how it was derived. Benny Thomasson pretty much originated what we now call Texas Fiddling or Contest Fiddling, Texas style. But, he developed it from Appalachian fiddling. So, he says, “What is the original greatness of Appalachian fiddling?" And I said, “It's hard to know." Because it's not written down and there's no recorded examples of it. We know Thomasson's version to be the great end result of development. And then he would talk about Bach and say, “The difference between this type of music and classical music is classical music is more absolute. Bach is what I'd call a pure music." And I asked, “What do you mean?" And he said, “Well, it wasn't borrowed, it wasn't derived from anything." I said, “Oh really? What about the Celtics? What about all those drones in those sonatas you play? You think that's German?" And then he sort of stood back. “What about the concerto form? That's Italian, and Bach composed concerto, so he must have been influenced by Italians."
It's amazing to keep tracing the DNA of things we have traditionally seen as “pure."
So, he did something that I find as amazing as him playing my music, which is he went back and looked at the Bach sonatas and two or three years later he re-recorded them all. He mentions in some of his interviews how he was influenced by this project, how he held his bow so differently in the sonatas to create different types of accents and excitement, and he reached further into the musical style.
That means you get a big gold star, sir. How many people have bent Yo Yo Ma's perspective on music? Take that one to the bank! I think you've always had this intrinsic range and urge towards cross-pollination since the very beginning. My first two exposures to your music were The Dixie Dregs' Industry Standard [1982] and Nanci Griffith's Once In A Very Blue Moon [1984]. One would be hard pressed to find many musicians who could or would play on those two records.
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That Nanci Griffith recording was before I became a bona fide session musician, and it was because of that album that I gained the confidence to believe I could contribute something to the national recording scene. It was because I came up with my own session style on that album, a certain way to play with a vocalist. It was very, very interesting because I'd done some demo sessions with some older players around that time and I was trying to break in. And the way a fiddler played on recordings in Nashville was different than my tendencies, and I actually got scolded several times during these demo sessions, where I was told, “You can't play over the vocal!" You had to play more like a call-and-response every single time, but you had to clear out for the next vocal phrase.
That's very Charlie Daniels.
Exactly, all the way! That's the way fiddling was approached almost exclusively, and my tendency was to create layers. What's funny about this is that the recording techniques were being developed as well, so you could have more things going on at the same time where the ear could actually hear it through the speakers. So, I came along at a very fortunate technological era where I felt I could create these types of nuances. I started doing that with the Nanci Griffith album and people loved it.
Given the era of that album it still sounds remarkably fresh. There's so much music from the early '80s that's very dated. It just can't be listened to anymore because the musicians couldn't work out the relationship with technology.
And Lyle Lovett, who I'd met the year before while hitchhiking across Texas together, sang background on that album.
A lot of now-famous people come into the country world on that album. Some of Bela's earliest studio work is on that album, too.
There was a whole host of acoustic musicians - Roy Huskey Jr. is on there and I think Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas, too. It's like a signal of things to come.
That group of guys you just named off has gone on to become a sort of template for younger string players. I know Chris Thile a bit and he's said your examples helped show him that he could do whatever he wanted to do.
We need more Chris Thiles.
Chris is someone that gets that music is a key to unlock the entire universe, right down to the most spiritual things any of us will ever experience.
Spirituals and gospel music is a part of American music. It's inescapable to not have that have a huge impact. Even people that are not religious are going to be moved by the spirit of it because it's in the nature of Americana. Simple tunes like “Amazing Grace" affect so many people. It doesn't matter what religious perspective you are, it's moving for a lot of people. Spiritual music just permeates our history. Part of the whole thing here is people wanting to practice their own religion more freely from the monarchy. So, this whole place was kind of developed with this spirit, and it permeates the music. It makes us feel like we're home when we hear it and partake of it.
One of the things I love about performing is when I get into the zone, the audience and the concert hall becomes quieter. When I can achieve those times I feel like music becomes really important at that moment. And I'm acting as a conduit or some sort of vessel for creating a special moment that people can take away. As a stage performer or entertainer, that's my job, sort of like a humorist is supposed to make people laugh and a really good rock or dance band is supposed to make people dance and jump up and down. And I'm supposed to make people really quiet and still.
