A fiddler who fuses folk and classical

NEW YORK - Violinists - even at their most classical - like to call themselves fiddlers. But such persons at the Curtis Institute of Music are about to see what fiddling truly means, with somebody who learned it from backwoods, Deep South musicians with roots extending back to the Civil War.

The instigator is composer/violinist Mark O'Connor, best known for

Appalachia Waltz

and

Appalachian Journey

, his best-selling albums with Yo-Yo Ma, and for a kind of music making that straddles folk and classical. Tuesday at Curtis' Field Concert Hall, O'Connor will play a recital of his own unaccompanied violin works (imagine J.S. Bach meets the Iron Mountain String Band) prior to three days of master classes.

He'll join Jennifer Higdon to teach composition, Ida Kavafian for violin, and composer/bassist Edgar Meyer for all those elements and more. By no means is Curtis in a time warp - all three members of the bluegrass-ish Time for Three are Curtis grads - though many students will confront the opposite of what brought them to this august institution: improvisation. Will kicking and screaming be heard across Rittenhouse Square?

"It doesn't hit them over the head the way it might have 30 years ago," O'Connor says, having done similar teaching stints at Harvard and Rice Universities. "It used to be that very few people going to conservatory would even associate with people who would play rock music. Now, I don't know if I've met a string player who doesn't like rock music. It's part of the culture. They go to see friends who play in bands."

Mixing hayseeds with Mozart could be a potential turnoff (besides, wasn't this folk/classical fusion accomplished by Aaron Copland 50 years ago?), particularly since O'Connor is a freewheeling, media-savvy guy who clearly enjoys his success.

Not given to false humility, he has his two Grammy awards conspicuously displayed in the living room of his midtown Manhattan apartment - though they sit on the kind of improvised cinder-block bookshelves you see in college dorms.

In more serious moments, O'Connor acknowledges how lucky he is. He has been named musician of the year by the Country Music Association six times and regularly plays his folk/classical fusion pieces with symphony orchestras; his two discs with Ma collectively sold a million CDs in the mid- and late- 1990s, giving him both pop-music visibility and credibility in classical circles that has translated into commissions for numerous concertos and string quartets and a symphony.

It's also true that after years recording for Sony, he now runs his own label. His marriage ended badly, but the resulting move from San Diego to New York put him in a creative nexus more comfortable than any other in which he has lived. He gave up alcohol and became a vegetarian - and found himself composing more easily than ever. He's up to six violin concertos. Over the last four years, he estimates that he has written 13 hours of music. He's 47 but looks 10 years younger.

His big-picture ambition is to help create a world in which a fortuitous meeting with Yo-Yo Ma isn't so necessary. O'Connor always had a strong pedagogical streak: He's publishing a string method book that's the product of many years of organizing five-day intensive string camps.

"It gets a little lonely," he says. "We need other musicians. It's hard to be a creative instrumentalist and think, 'I'm the only one who should play this stuff.' That's a dangerous vacuum to get into. I have a unique style, but I don't want to own it. I want to give it away."

The new EMI disc by the Eroica Trio titled

An American Journey

is a microcosm of what he's after. Next to transcriptions of Gershwin and Bernstein sits O'Connor's

Poets and Prophets

, possibly the only classical chamber work inspired by Johnny Cash. O'Connor coached the trio on his more vernacular style over three years - though not its new violinist, Susie Parks. He didn't have to. "It's now being transferred," he says. "That's very healthy."

Much was transferred to O'Connor at an early age. When he was growing up in Seattle, his first instrument was classical guitar, but his frustration with barre chords reduced him to tears. When he switched to violin, his mother drove him to summer fiddler conventions in the South, where his battery-powered tape recorder preserved interviews, songs and conversations.

"I was this little Yankee boy . . . and we'd end up on people's porches, at their barbecues. They wanted to tell me all these stories," he says. "I had [bluegrass legend] Bill Monroe sit me down and teach me three tunes in a row. That was my childhood. I absorbed all these encounters with people who had direct roots with their grandparents, which would predate the Civil War."

That sense of historic progression, he says, is missing in Copland, whose portrayals of rural and Western America in

Rodeo

and

Appalachian Spring

would seem to make him the godfather of what O'Connor and Curtis' like-minded Meyer are after. Yet both harbor ambivalence toward the Brooklyner who gave voice to the expanse of the American West. O'Connor points out that Copland's famous "Hoe Down" tune in

Rodeo

actually came from Kentucky fiddler William Hamilton Stepp, as preserved in a 1937 recording at the Library of Congress.

Even Copland's treatment of such tunes sacrificed integrity, O'Connor says. That Copland is easily mastered by players with strictly European training isn't right: "It would hurt my feelings if Ida Kavafian came in and, virtuoso that she is, was able to play this stuff in nothing flat. I'd wonder, 'What am I doing?' " O'Connor says.

The even bigger picture isn't so much the institutionalization of indigenous American fiddle playing, but giving performers wider points of reference. Improvisation can help. But O'Connor's seminar partner Meyer, who composes orchestral works and recorded Bach extensively, wants performers to think more like composers: "I've observed that the string players I've enjoyed the most in classical music, without exception, show an insatiable interest in composition."

There's nothing jingoistic or evangelistic going on here. In Meyer's

Violin Concerto

, written for Hilary Hahn, folk influences (if there) aren't overt. Though O'Connor's

Americana Symphony

is like the soundtrack to a pioneer movie, he never sets out to compose anything visually graphic or with a story of sorts.

"It's actually the reverse," he said. "I'll create a piece of music and I don't know how to write the program notes for the premiere. Then I realize what I'd gone through during that time.

Then

it creates a 'story.' "