Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 14, 1995                   TAG: 9510170106
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JIM PATTERSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NASHVILLE, TENN.                                 LENGTH: Medium

MARK O'CONNOR IS FIDDLING WITH A MUSIC MISSION

Set on a spectacular hill in Nashville, it is distractedly furnished (he's divorced and distinctly nonfastidious about nonmusical things) and cluttered with misleading evidence of a slacker - piles of VCR tapes stand ready to revive long-gone NBA games and great days in the O.J. Simpson trial.

But among the clutter are more awards and trophies than can be easily counted. They haphazardly trace the career of anything but a layabout. At various spots in his life, O'Connor's been a boy prodigy, a restless, top-dollar musician-for-hire and a solo star (playing fiddle music on hit albums like ``New Nashville Cats'' and ``Heroes'').

His latest goal is to be a classical composer.

Untrained classically, O'Connor has turned out the well-received ``Fiddle Concerto for Violin & Orchestra'' and lately has been recording with classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He teaches at Blair School of Music, the classical music school at Vanderbilt University, and conducts an annual fiddle camp at a state park.

``I heard Mark down at The Station Inn [a bluegrass club] when I'd been in town only two or three weeks,'' said Mark Wait, Blair's dean.

``Here was someone with technique like Jascha Heifetz, who could improvise like nobody I'd ever heard. And I thought, `We're crazy if we don't make that kind of talent available to our students.'''

Other composers - Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Gershwin, Copeland - have bridged the gap between folk and academic music. O'Connor is unique in that his starting point isn't the classical world. He is reaching into that realm with a Texas fiddle, sort of a mirror image to Copeland incorporating folk melodies in classical works.

``I start everything from the basis of a Texas fiddle style,'' O'Connor said. ``As soon as I start playing, it's got a rock edge to it and everything but you can definitely realize that I was a Texas old-time fiddler at one point.''

O'Connor, 34, grew up in Seattle, winning his first contest at the age of 10 on flamenco guitar. A protege of Texas fiddle great Benny Thomasson, he recorded four albums by the time he reached high school.

His obvious talent intimidated even the music instructors. Some children responded with ridicule. Part of O'Connor's mission today is making music, especially fiddling, a routine part of the lives of the next generation even if most of them won't have world-class talent.

``One thing about fiddling that's really nice is that you don't have to be technically gifted or you don't have to be a virtuoso to really enjoy the music,'' O'Connor said. ``Fiddle tunes at various levels can not only be enjoyable to the player but to listeners as well.''

O'Connor sometimes incorporates his boyhood love of skateboarding when performing for children, in an effort to show them that a musician isn't ``another fuddy-duddy adult.'' He's mastered playing fiddle and skateboarding at the same time, a sure attention-getter with the kids.