| Edgar Meyer |
Bluegrass
Edgar Meyer emerged in the 1990s as one of the world1s most talented string bass players, at home, remarkably, in both the classical repertory and in bluegrass. He is also a composer whose works achieved wide diffusion in the late 1990s; they served as cornerstones in the efforts of the giant Sony label to forge new audiences for classical music by offering compositions with a direct, accessible musical language.
Born in the major American recording center of Nashville, Meyer was the son of a bass player. When he was two or three years old he started imitating his father by holding a broom, pretending it was a bass, and acting out playing it. He started learning on a real instrument at five years old, taking lessons from his father. The instrument was a 1933 bass made in Czechoslovakia and in use, hanging from someone1s ceiling, as a flower planter. Meyer has said that he grew up with the bass as his primary means of personal expression, and became committed to the instrument so early that he is unable to remember a time when he was not.
Later he studied with Stuart Sankey, but still credits his father as his primary teacher. He attended the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, studying with James Buswell. Meyer won numerous competitions, and from the beginning forged a crossover career, playing with classical musicians as well as popular and country acts. What steered him toward the country side--an unusual place indeed for a classical musician--was his encounter, in his early twenties, with the virtuosic and complex progressive bluegrass music of the 1980s, as exemplified by such performers as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and Bela Fleck. He moved to Nashville in his early twenties, and has toured and/or recorded with Garth Brooks, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Hank Williams, Jr., Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, Lyle Lovett, Reba McEntire, Travis Tritt, the Chieftains, the Indigo Girls, Bela Fleck, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Joshua Bell, and Mark O1Connor. From 1986 to 1992 he was a member of a progressive bluegrass band called Strength in Numbers.
He began to compose around 1990, primarily to write down things that had emerged in his playing from "noodling around" and improvising, and "codify" them into pieces. He was a regular performer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival from 1885 to 1993; six of his earliest compositions were intended for performance there. He has composed a double bass concerto, a bass quartet, a work called "Trout Variations" (based on the Schubert song used in that composer1s "Trout" Quintet), a string trio, a violin concerto (premiered and recorded by teenage sensation Hilary Hahn, and a double concerto for bass and cello. Much of his music is influenced by bluegrass and traditional American folk styles.
Meyer records exclusively for Sony Masterworks. He is married to violinist Connie Heard; they have a son. He has been a member of the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center since 1994, and in that same year became the first bassist to win the Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Joseph Stevenson
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