Mark O’Connor worried that his violin wouldn’t remember him.

The instrument had suffered multiple fractures when it fell backstage before a concert in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in early April. Jonathan Cooper, who made the violin for O’Connor in his Portland shop, had to take it apart and glue its pieces back together using eight high-tension clamps. One crack was 14 inches long.

When Cooper hand-delivered the repaired instrument to O’Connor in late April before a concert in Fairfield, Connecticut, O’Connor wasn’t sure what to expect.

“It remembered everything I had played into it. And something awoke in it because of the repair. It had a new dimension to it. It was just hot, bursting with gusto and fire,” said O’Connor, 53, one of the country’s pre-eminent fiddle players and teachers. “Breaking an instrument is not a good strategy to improve its sound, but in this case there was a really positive outcome.”

This weekend O’Connor will bring his rejuvenated violin back to the place where it was given new life. He’ll play two shows, Saturday and Sunday, at Acoustic Artisans on Congress Street in Portland. The venue is run by Cooper, adjacent to his workshop.

O’Connor is a Grammy-winning musician known in classic, folk and jazz circles. The musicians he has played with include Yo-Yo Ma, Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs. He bought his violin from Cooper in 2002 but only began playing it as his primary instrument in 2010, when he switched from a French violin made in 1830.

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Besides his success as a musician, O’Connor is known for promoting his “O’Connor Method” of violin teaching, which allows students to learn on American music. O’Connor said part of the reason he is performing in Maine now is to bring attention to an “O’Connor Method” violin camp scheduled to be held next July at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland. The camp is being organized by the Liberty Family Foundation, but O’Connor plans to make an appearance.

“We’ve ignored American music for so long, for violin training, and you had kids quitting in droves because they hated what they were playing,” said O’Connor.

O’Connor said it only makes sense then that he should also help people recognize that there are great American-made violins, too. That’s how he came to buy a violin from Cooper.

Cooper has made more than 200 instruments over the past 35 years, mostly violins, which he sells for about $15,000 each. Based on his experience, Cooper knows exactly what O’Connor was talking about when he said the violin “remembered” everything that had been played into it.

“That’s a real thing. The instrument gets imbued with what and how they play,” said Cooper, 64. “You can build a good instrument, but the bigger part of how it sounds is what happens after they are made, after they’re played.”

The reason O’Connor heard a new “gusto and fire” in his fixed instrument, Cooper said, might have something to do with the fact that Cooper removed and then replicated the instrument’s bass bar, a piece of wood inside the violin. Often when that happens, an instrument becomes more responsive, he said.

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But most people don’t have their violin taken apart and put back together unless it gets broken. Cooper got O’Connor’s broken violin just a few days after the accident, and spent the next five days repairing it. The Maine Sunday Telegram documented the repair in April.

O’Connor has had only four primary violins in his 40 years of playing professionally. He was a child prodigy who began his career by winning fiddle contests. Of those four instruments, he has broken two. In the 1970s, he dropped a telephone receiver on the white violin with which he had won many contests.

The Cooper violin suffered its fractures in April after O’Connor’s microphone cord snagged it and caused it to fall to the ground just before a scheduled performance that was to be recorded for public radio. O’Connor had to borrow an instrument he had never played before and go on with the show.

O’Connor said people who come out to see him play his Portland-made fiddle this weekend will hear a range of American music that likely will include “St. Louis Blues,” “Ashokan Farewell” (featured in Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”) and the Cajun tune “Jole Blon.”

O’Connor will be accompanied by another violinist, Maggie Dixon, who carries two violins with her.

Despite the trauma of breaking his Cooper violin and maybe because he loves the sound of the repaired one so much, O’Connor does not carry a spare violin of his own.

“Why don’t I carry an extra? It’s a logical question. I do have a double case, so I could,” he said. “But I don’t.”


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