The progress of Ezra Pound's life and career can be fairly accurately charted according to the people he met and when he met them. Two meetings in 1923 are responsible for his decision to seriously try his hand at composing music. The first was with composer George Antheil, who started off his own career, like Pound, as a "bad boy" art-brat and avant-garde attention-seeker. The second, perhaps more significant, was with the talented young concert violinist Olga Rudge, who became Pound's lifelong mistress, mother to his child, and sole care-keeper in the last decades of his life. With Pound in the middle, the two friendships activated each other like the poles of a battery, but most of all Antheil's presence helped Pound pursue his romantic relationship with Rudge. Pound immediately became a champion of Antheil's boisterous, noisy art, and requested from him several violin sonatas for his soon-to-be mistress. But the ever-ebullient Pound, always a doer never a talker, couldn't merely sit on the sidelines. So in his pursuit of Rudge, and against all odds, he began composing his own violin music for her. The modest Fiddle Music, first suite, is Pound's second entirely original piece of music. It is also the only piece of "absolute music" he ever composed. Fiddle Music is not related to any poem or external literary allusion or program. It's organized in six tiny movements, restricted mostly to open string positions and a two-octave tessitura. With its emphatic rhythms and simple motivic lines, it is indeed very much "fiddle" music rather than "violin." In places, it sounds like he's trying to give a genuinely Celtic whiskey-and-seafood flavor. Although unsophisticated, it nevertheless demonstrates a clearer sense of musical architecture than the operas. The style of each movement contrasts with the previous in a meaningful way, including the use of characteristic intervals to give each its own sound. Melodic material is reiterated and reshaped with constructive, guiding intelligence, and the overall melodic lyricism, sometimes expressive, is often surprisingly convincing. At the world premiere in London in May 1924—where it was programmed alongside Antheil's violin sonatas—Rudge apparently played only the final three movements of the piece. The first three were dug up from the Pound archives at Yale by Robert Hughes. Fiddle Music, First Suite was finally premiered in its entirety in 2001.

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