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Hollis Taylor is
a unique figure in music. Once the youngest member of the Oregon Symphony
(in the violin section at age 18) and concertmaster/soloist at Wolf
Trap Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC., she went on
to win the Oregon State Fiddle Championship. Since then, she has continued
to defy categorization.
In 1986 the
Oregon Arts Commission sponsored her "Symphony for String Band."
Her playing is featured in two Gus Van Sant films, "My Own
Private Idaho" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."
Her CD "Twisted Fiddle" received international acclaim
and airplay for its jazz-influenced arrangements of country classics
and a "1991 Folk Album of the Year" nomination by the
National Association of Independent Record Distributors. She tours
regularly as soloist with Grammy/Emmy award-winner Mason Williams.
The American
Center in Paris awarded her a two-year residency at the Cité
Internationale des Arts for 1993-94. While based in Paris, Taylor
performed and recorded jazz and folk music throughout Europe and
completed her fourth book of fiddle arrangements, Tricks From the
Devil's Box. She regularly contributes in-depth articles, interviews,
and music criticism to Strings and Fiddler magazines. She was a
featured composer/performer/lecturer at Scripps College's 1995 Inaugural
Symposium on Women in Music and is a member of the American String
Teacher Alternative String Conference advisory committee.
As a composer,
Taylor also blurs the lines of classical, jazz, and folk. European
folk music in compound meter inspired Unsquare Dances, composed
in Budapest, Hungary in 1995. Two works make up the CD Frames and
Boxes: Trail Mix for Five Scordatura Violins (2000 First Prize winner,
National League of American PEN Women) and Box Set for Solo Violin,
a re-take of the J. S. Bach Solo Violin Partita in B minor reflecting
Afro-Cuban, bebop, blues, and funk sensibilities, the product of
a 1997 artist's residency at Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic
awarded by Parsons School of Design in New York City. In 2000, she
received grants from the American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer,
and the Portland Baroque Orchestra to compose Groove Theory, a violin
concerto for British Baroque violinist Monica Huggett.
Taylor's most
recent works include commissions from the Elements Quartet of New
York City for two string quartets (the second featuring baritone
Jubilant Sykes) and from ABC Radio/Sydney for a major radiophonic
piece for string quartet, vocalist, actress, and distressed piano
on the life of anthropologist Olive Pink. Recent performances include
an international string festival in Berlin, the Jazz Initiative
in Frankfurt, Mains d'Oeuvres in Paris, jazz clubs in France, the
Perth New Music Festival, and Violins in the Outback, plus "Great
Fences of Australia" sound and video installation/performances
in collaboration with Jon Rose at the Melbourne Festival, the Asia/Pacific
Festival in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, the Serralves Museum of
Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, the Sydney Festival, the Darwin
Festival, and the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum, Belgium.
In 2004, she
was violin soloist in the world premiere of “Charlie's Whiskers”
by Jon Rose, a tribute to Charles Ives, commissioned by Tone Roads
Festival for the Bratislava Chamber Soloists, Slovakia. Her Scordatura
Project debuted at the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum, Belgium,
in May 2005 and was featured at the Melbourne Festival in October
2005.
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