With her hot pink violin, Sarah Charness has been electrifying New York City recently as the city's resident party girl, but the classically-trained musician can really talk shop when it comes to K-pop.
"It's really cool," Charness said regarding the South Korean music scene's love of strings.
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"String instruments are so important over there. It's in the culture. Playing a stringed instrument is such a big thing in Korea."
Charness is hot off the red carpet at the Maxim Top 100 party and a recent appearance on the Miami Fashion Week's runway. But she took some time out of her busy schedule this week, to discuss K-Pop's premiere string trio, Odd Eye, in an exclusive interview with KpopStarz.
The pink violinist immediately cited Odd Eye's special spark.
"Besides mixing the classics with their own culture, one of the things Odd Eye is doing that makes it super cool is that they're playing and singing at the same time," Charness said.
"That's beyond, beyond cool. It's something I haven't really seen before and it takes a real talent to do that...they're also mixing sounds from their own culture and scales of their own culture with these western pop songs. It makes it cool and very interesting to hear."
The violinist points out that her own background is similar to the Odd Eye band members.
"My background is really mostly classical," Charness said. "These girls, especially in these videos, are really showing that they have a huge classical background just to be able to play the way they're playing."
Though the musician recognizes the proper postures in Odd Eye, she also sees another common trait.
"Its definitely fun," Charness said. "It's taking [the possibility of string music] up to the next level, which they are definitely doing."
The New England Conservatory-trained violinist also discussed the Hallyu movement as a whole.
"K-pop has such a leg up in the dance music world," Charness said. "They make some amazing productions."
Like Odd Eye, Charness has always been fascinated with taking string music beyond the confines of classical music.
"I was listening to beats," she recalled of her youth. "I was listening to a lot of world music. I was trying to understand how this instrument could fit into other styles that I wasn't being taught in school."
But the major breakthrough came for Charness at the age of 16, with the discovery of a new variation on the violin, one that came in pink.
"The first person I saw playing an electric violin was Mark Wood," she said.
"He's the person who actually built my pink electric violin. He also came from a classical background. He came from Julliard. He was really into rock and roll. He created this instrument that really could be at home in a rock band."
Wood gave a demonstration of the instruments he was making at Sarah's music camp.
"I immediately fell in love and said 'I have to have one of these,'" Charness said. "Finally I was able to get my violin to make sounds that it otherwise wouldn't be able to make. You can process it. You can do all sorts of things with equipment and technology to make sounds you otherwise couldn't do."
Yet not everyone was initially as excited about Charness's pink violin as she was.
"No one had heard of electric violins in clubs," she said. "Now it's everywhere. But seven years ago it was not. I begged to play with these DJs that I really wanted to play with. It was fun and club goers really started to appreciate having the violin in this kind of music."
Charness and her violin hit classic venues on tour with The Transberian Orchestra "for a couple of months doing 'Beethoven's Last Night.'"
"It was great to play in some of these historic theaters," she said. "We did Radio City Music Hall and the Chicago Theater."
But her favorite venue was MSG.
"Madison Square Garden was probably the most fun," she said. "The energy at MSG absorbs all the energy of the people who performed there in the past."
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