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rk O’Connor Commissioned by the Santa Fe and La Jolla Chamber Music Festivals This live performance film features the New York City premiere at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Center on April 28th, 2009. The Players: Ida Kavafian - 1st Violin Mark O’Connor - 2nd Violin Paul Neubauer - Viola Matt Haimovitz - Cello The Master of Ceremonies: Elliott Forrest of New York’s WQXR (Notes from the composer) As I continue to develop other artistic interpretations of vernacular and idiomatic music of my own past, I uncover new pathways in discovering how much this music from my childhood means to me in the present tense. With my String Quartet No 2, I bring to bare one of my favorite music styles I learned as an 11 and 12 year old, Bluegrass. Bluegrass music is the vocabulary I use in the quartet and it instructs the musical language of the string quartet art form. From the bouncy bluegrass vocal like melodies, to the blistering fast hot licks, to the rhythmic bow “chopping” to the gospel yearnings of the slow movement, I wanted to comprehensively dive down deep in to the strains of this music. I wanted to further discover what this American musical art form means to string playing, what it means to this quartet, and ultimately what my own past means to me today. –Mark O’Connor (2005) The studio recording of Quartet No. 2 by the same lineup of musicians can be found here: https://www.omacrecords.com/omac-14-string-quartets-2-3 Original music printed from the composer’s manuscripts available at: http://www.sitemason.com/site/kGwSPe/string.quartet.2.bluegrass.html http://www.markoconnor.com https://www.facebook.com/markoconnorofficial https://twitter.com/markoconnorband