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Something remarkable has happened to classical music at the start of the new millennium: After a century in which our little blue world became dramatically smaller, thanks to communications and transportation technology, classical music has become more inclusive, embracing styles and traditions that were previously thought to be incompatible with the great Western heritage of Bach and Beethoven. Appalachian Journey is a good example -- a seamless, completely natural invention by three musicians who respond as readily to American string band music as they do to a Baroque violin concerto. This is the new face of classical music.
Mark O'Connor, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer are helping to define classical music's new sound. It appeals to an audience that might not stop to consider whether the music is "classical" or not. It sounds as good at The Bottom Line as it does at Carnegie Hall. And, surprisingly, it is a logical extension of the rich European tradition of classical composers who drew upon their native folk traditions: just think of Dvorák with his Czech dances, Bartók and Kodály tramping through the Hungarian countryside, Vaughan Williams setting English folk songs for orchestra.
"Edgar has done so much to bring this kind of music to audiences," says violinist Mark O'Connor. Edgar Meyer's recent projects for Sony Classical include 1999's Short Trip Home, which matched the renowned violinist Joshua Bell with gifted bluegrass string players Sam Bush and Mike Marshall; and, of course, 1996's Appalachia Waltz, the first album by the formidable Ma/Meyer/O'Connor trio. For his part, the bassist is quick to credit his colleagues for the remarkable success of his apparently quixotic musical ventures. "For me," he says, "the primary motivation and excitement of this music is the talent pool. These two guys play with such virtuosity and so beautifully that it's always stimulating"
Indeed, Yo-Yo Ma is no dilettante when it comes to this music. When Ma asked Mark O'Connor for a solo version of his song "Appalachia Waltz" for his recent Sony album Solo, O'Connor recalls thinking, "now this music is becoming equally his own." And in fact, Ma draws a very deep and personal connection between this trio and his recent performances of the standard classical repertoire. He and Edgar Meyer collaborated on a recording of Schubert's Trout Quintet in 1996. And shortly after the release of Simply Baroque, an album on which Ma plays Baroque cello with Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Ma explained: "When I first started working with Mark O'Connor, his articulation was so much like Baroque playing that the only way I could match it, and match the speed of his articulation, was to take my modern bow and play it so that it felt more like a Baroque bow. So in a funny way I came to playing the Baroque cello from watching very carefully a really great fiddler. Because of course that is also a centuries-old tradition."
"I've just assumed that many kinds of music are related," O'Connor responds. "So I've played classical, jazz, folk, making connections. Yo-Yo hears those connections, and I think that's what influences him. He's not only hearing those connections, but bringing them to the standard classical repertoire, and explaining how he's playing Bach differently because of the different musics he's hearing."
This new album picks up where Appalachia Waltz left off, but it is more than just a sequel. "We wanted to keep the core idea," O'Connor explains, "which is a string trio with an unusual instrumentation -- most people overlook that -- and expand it a bit." They decided to invite James Taylor and Alison Krauss each to sing one of Stephen Foster's songs. Foster was an inspired choice. Like the anonymous medieval songwriters who wrote the tarantellas, saltarellos, and estampies of their day, Foster wrote songs that eventually outlasted their pop status and were claimed by the classical world. His music is distinctly American, but truly classic.
The addition of songwriter James Taylor and fiddler/vocalist Alison Krauss also seemed a natural extension of the trio. "James has influenced me profoundly," Edgar Meyer says. "It's not just the singing, not just the voice itself. It's the idea of him being a complete entity. He's not a singer, a writer, a player, or a producer -- he's all of those together. Music for him is a complete thought; you can't break it down into parts." Taylor sings Stephen Foster's familiar "Hard Times Come Again No More", in an unabashedly nostalgic, bittersweet arrangement for voice and bowed strings. Alison Krauss' rendition of Foster's classic lullaby "Slumber My Darling" is both quintessentially American yet somehow universal as well. "It wasn't really a matter of arranging these songs," Meyer explains. "It was more a question of fitting some big personalities into each song." How? "You just let them do it. And," he laughs, "you try not to give them too many instructions."
Meyer and O'Connor shared the bulk of the writing chores on this recording, gleefully drawing on the wealth of styles and the high level of virtuosity available to them. Meyer's "Indecision", for example, is a witty, mercurial piece that shifts between elegant restraint and an exaggerated bluesy section for which the word "swampy" somehow seems appropriate. "Caprice for Three", by Mark O'Connor, is a follow-up to the six Caprices for solo violin that appear on his album Midnight on the Water. This one was also intended as a virtuoso theme for fiddle, until O'Connor thought better of it. "Of all the cello and bass players out there, I realized that Edgar and Yo-Yo could probably do these incredibly fast bowing triplets better than anyone."
Various allusions to traditional fiddle styles throughout the recording come together in the traditional tune "Fisher's Hornpipe", which revels in the sounds of two fiddles together, as Alison Krauss joins Mark O'Connor. The piece has an almost orchestral sound, with Yo-Yo Ma's cello threatening to join the violins in the musical stratosphere toward the end of the piece and Meyer's bass steadily anchoring the ensemble in terra firma.
"1B" has the cheery sound of an old American two-step, but it's actually an Edgar Meyer composition: "It's part of a series I wrote for my 6-year-old son George to play on the violin. Yo-Yo points out that 'family' is a theme that runs through the recording, because 'Emily's Reel' is for Yo-Yo's daughter Emily to play on the violin, and 'Benjamin' was written for James Taylor's son Benjamin." O'Connor's "Poem for Carlita" was written for his wife, whom he has known since they were eight years old. Perhaps nowhere are family, hearth and home more audible than in Taylor's lovely song without words; "Benjamin" sounds like the musical version of a Currier & Ives print.
Like Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor has a strong classical background that may surprise fans who know him as one of America's most accomplished bluegrass or country fiddlers. The duo "Limerock", for violin and cello, is his reworking of a traditional concert piece for violin and bass, which he recorded 10 years ago with Edgar Meyer. But O'Connor found that most bassists couldn't play it, so he began performing it instead with cellists as an encore at the end of his orchestral concerts.
O'Connor's compositional skills are also evident in the sprawling, almost narrative "Vistas". The work's initial inspiration came from his home studio, in Vista, California. "My studio has three different views," he explains. "So I was thinking about our three personalities -- about having three different views or ideas, but in the end we're all talking about the same thing." A very small theme is explored separately by all three instruments, each arriving at the same melodic conclusions but at different points. Put together in an almost symphonic form, "Vistas" suggests a journey beneath big skies and far-off horizons, and finally a return home. And in "Vistas", O'Connor says, "Yo-Yo just took over. He was really excited, telling us how to play certain parts, what to change -- he almost conducted it. He really took it to another place, and I think the success of the piece is due to his involvement."
It's become clear that Yo-Yo Ma has a real affinity for Mark O'Connor's music. The cellist has often played the solo version of O'Connor's "Appalachia Waltz" on tour. "People in Europe will say, this reminds me of Norwegian fiddling -- but it was written in Santa Fe, New Mexico!" he marvels. "But it's part of the same flow." For him, it's yet another piece of evidence pointing to the often deep and surprising connections between different musical styles. And perhaps another hint at the inevitability of classical music's embrace of those styles.
Perhaps the best analogy for this music is to the enormous fields of mushrooms found in the American Midwest, which botanists have now determined are in fact a single organism. Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O'Connor have engaged in a little musical mycology of their own: in exploring apparently disparate musical traditions, they've found a common network of roots that binds them all together. "We live in such different worlds," O'Connor says, "but we come together, and when we're done, we leave with the sense that things are a lot closer than even we thought. On Appalachia Waltz, we were asking the question, what would it sound like if we put our three voices together? Now, with Appalachian Journey, we have a fourth sound -- our group sound. It sounds like no other group. That's the sound of this album." And a glimpse at the new sound of classical music in the twenty-first century.
John Schaefer
Executive Producer of Music Programming for
WNYC Radio in New York, and author of the book
New Sounds: A Listener's Guide to New Music
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