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Mark O'Connor - Violin Concerto No. 6 "Old Brass"

1,838 views · Published 17 May 2018 · 35:03 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: Mark O'Connor · 2018 · Music

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VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 6 "Old Brass"
(Composed and Orchestrated by Mark O’Connor, 2003)
Violin - Mark O'Connor
Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Joe Smirnoff

During a lovely visit to a plantation in South Carolina designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Fall of 2002, I was inspired with the principal ideas for a new concerto. I wanted to somehow “plant” the music I wished to create, right there at the plantation. The buildings and layout were largely hexagonal so I thought of groupings in six note musical phrases, as well as measures in 6/8 time. I also developed what I call six sided musical ideas with the feeling of hexagon shapes taking place within the music swinging back and forth between the feel of counts in two, and phrases in groups of three to create a musical shape of a hexagon. I tried to apply these very natural groupings of music notation in ways that Wright spoke of in his desire for the six sided shape to comfortably interface with nature. These ideas make up most of the 1st movement.

For the slow 2nd movement, I wanted to concentrate on how Wright’s vision of a “black water” lake was instrumental in his overall layout of the South Carolina plantation. After concentrating on the lake for sometime, the combinations of the black, gray and dark green water slowly won me over so to speak, and after a while, I found it very beautiful. Mysterious, as “the South” can be, but hauntingly rich in another kind of serene beauty that I notice a lot in this region of the world. I wanted to develop the colors I saw in to musical harmonies. And the vision of paddle boats floating through the trees full of Spanish Moss dangling down in the swampy lake was the artistic muse for the music.

The 3rd movement is a six measured length theme, cycling back to pick up on the hexagonal shape aspect again of the first movement. This theme however is developed as a fugue, applying the traditional rules of fugal writing, a single fugue in six parts for the most part. This is followed by a solo violin cadenza which will be improvised from the previous material, and then the final coda is a multiple part fugue combining all the major themes of all three movements overlaying each other for the final statement.

Old Brass is a “southern’ term relating to a person of both African and Native American heritage. Wright named his plantation “Auld Brass.” And there is something I appreciate in Wright’s vision as well. I have always embraced the philosophy that once a person impacts their creativity with the natural circumstances which surround them, then there is potential for that art to interface more naturally in to the world. 
- Mark O'Connor

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