There’s Dvorak’s New World Symphony themes with their Native American melodies and rhythms. When you play a French Canadian fiddle tune that swings with the rhythms of African American ragtime, that’s the melting pot. When you play a Mexican mariachi piece with a Czech polka beat that is popular with Texas folk fiddlers, that’s the melting pot. It represents the melting pot that is the best part of our American heritage. It’s music that bubbled up from “the people,” whether indigenous, or African and European transplants. Broadly defined, it’s music “from the Americas” (both continents) that reaches back into our earliest history. Mark O’Connor (MOC) is passionate about celebrating and preserving American “roots” music for strings. Now that the O’Connor Method has matured and I have also grown as a teacher, I’m thinking more about its place in my studio and how to use it most effectively. I was still developing my teaching approach and looking for alternatives to the ubiquitous Suzuki Method repertoire and teaching style.
I got my Books 1 and 2 training in 2011, when the method was new (it was introduced in 2009) and I was also relatively new to violin teaching. I just returned from Teacher Training in Mark O’Connor’s Violin Method Books 3 and 4, at his String Camp in North Carolina.
