Edgar Meyer

The Grass Is Sometimes Bluer.

Edgar Meyer

Edgar Meyer, a virtuoso bass player and composer, is fluent in two musical languages: Classical and Bluegrass. The Nashville native has recorded with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Garth Brooks and The Chieftains, and was a member of Strength in Numbers, which also featured Mark O'Connor, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Bela Fleck. When asked if his chamber music colleagues were jealous of the time he spends in Nashville he countered in his soft southern accent, "Probably glad to get rid of me!" Mr. Meyer's compositions traverse his musical worlds deliciously and unself-consciously. He has premiered his Bass Concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra, performed his Bass Quintet with the Emerson String Quartet and performed his String Trio with the Chamber Music Society. He has also composed a double concerto for himself and cellist Carter Brey. Perhaps his biggest audience was during a concert broadcast on PBS that also featured Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Rebecca Young and Pamela Frank, during which the ensemble performed Mr. Meyer's Trout Variations. Mr. Meyer is married to violinist Connie Heard; they have a three-year-old son. An Artist of the Society since 1994, Mr. Meyer records exclusively with Sony Classical.

"My father played the bass and from age two or three I was very interested in playing the bass. I don't remember anything much before five years old, but there are pictures of me with a broom pretending it was a bass. My parents tried to get me to play violin instead but I insisted on bass, and by age five I was playing one. I invested my personality in the instrument before it was a conscious decision; it was my natural mode of expression since before I remember. It was a complete identification with it -- that was who I was and what I did, which was combined with an insatiable curiosity about music from the earliest ages.

"The bass I grew up on was a flower planter that my father got for $25."

"There was no other teacher besides my father. I think of him in a very broad and inclusive way as a teacher, because the music he played in the house and his enthusiasm for music are probably at least as substantial a part of my musical upbringing as actually learning to play the bass. I think of him as the primary influence in my own life; being my bass teacher was almost peripheral to that. I went to school at Indiana and occasionally played for Gary Hoffman. He was the first great cellist I was in close contact with. I learned from Gary by watching and listening to him play, whereas I learned a lot from Jamie Buswell by what he said. Gary played in a way in which I would like to play, so I imitated that as much as I could. My bass teacher, Stuart Sanky, in addition to possessing great insight, provided tremendous enthusiasm about music and bass playing. Enthusiasm has been the most important thing for me in teachers.

"All my instruments are connected to my father in some way. The one I grew up on was a Czechoslovakian bass made in 1933 that he got for $25. It was a flower planter at the time; it had fallen off the back of a truck and people had hung it from their ceiling. I'm still very fond of that instrument; I played it until I was 23. The one I play in bigger works at the Society was made in the 1800s, and my father began to play it in 1962 or '63. It's a large five-string bass with a low B-string. The instrument I play most often was made by Johann Baptiste Gabrielli in 1769; my father ran into Sam Hollingsworth playing it in the '50s. Hollingsworth sold it to George Hofer in the late '50s and he decided to sell it in 1983. It's the instrument my father was really ambitious to have since before I was born.

"I read about my being animated on the instrument; it's not something I'm super aware of. One has to remember that the act of playing a lot of pieces on the bass involves pretty large movements of both arms; technically it would not be as good to be absolutely still in the body. To play correctly your back is going to rotate a little bit; if you tried to keep it absolutely still it would be a chore, whereas on the violin that's much more desirable.

"These days, 10 years after I began to compose, I have to get off the instrument a little more because I've done a lot of things that fall easily on the instrument. When I first started writing pieces at 26 I had 21 years of playing on an instrument where I'd always been noodling and doing this and that, and playing in a lot of different improvised ensembles, and I had a lot of instrumental things that I wanted to codify into pieces. Now I have the most success just thinking for a while and recording my ideas. I'm more in the routine of writing pieces so I'm able to evaluate a little more easily alone without the instruments. The primary impetus comes away from the instrument at least 70 percent of the time now.

"I spent a lot of time in the Bluegrass community... It was like going to college again."

"My day-to-day involvement with musical language is such that sitting down and writing a piece is the same as writing words is for most folks. In classical music, people started associating writing pieces with an IQ test; you're smart enough to do it or you're not. It might be an IQ test to write a piece like Beethoven did, but just to sit down and write a piece is not a big deal; it's just a matter of how far you want to take it.

"I spent a lot of time in the Bluegrass community; you wouldn't say anything I do is straight out Bluegrass but I have spent many years working with some of the primary people in my generation who do that -- Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. Working with those guys, and with Mark O'Connor and Bela Fleck, for ten years right after college was like going to college again. The most exciting playing experiences I remember were playing in Strength in Numbers at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in the late '80s. That was a time when I was still excited to play for big audiences. It was the first time I had really played around Sam and Jerry and Mark and Bela with everybody fired up. I'll always remember the electricity those guys could generate.

"Other than music and being around my family, I have a strong interest in mathematics. It's something I would go back and study if I ever had the time.

"I feel very fortunate to have the situation I do musically, professionally and otherwise. I get to do almost exactly what I want, or certainly have as much freedom as a person could have in a normal lifetime. Since I get every opportunity to let it go there, that's the outlet. I tend to want to channel everything into what I'm doing musically -- which probably leaves me a bit boring personally.

"I'm comfortable with my achievements to date but no one of them is completely satisfying. I would certainly like to become a much better composer and a much better player."

Ideal person to have dinner with tonight:

"Definitely Bach or Beethoven. I'd even more just like to be a fly on the wall while they worked. I'd enjoy meeting with them; that'd be tops for me. I admire Mozart but I'm not exactly sure I'd want to be around him."