Contemporary Classics August 18, 2020 The Accordion in Contemporary Classical Music

Tonight’s Contemporary Classics is an exploration of the accordion as an instrument in the contemporary classical music repertoire.  It was inspired by two works.  Last year I heard for the first time the music of João Jeh-Oh Pedro Oliveira, a Portuguese composer.  One work on that album was his L'Accordéon Du Diable for solo accordion and electronics.  Then earlier this year Iranian-American composer Anahita Abassi invited me to I listen to a live streamed performance of her work Schattenfragmente for solo accordion.  Both of these works opened my ears and heart to the world of the classical accordion, which before that exposure I though of nothing but Astor Piazzolla.  I hope in tonight’s show to similarly share with you the range of accordion music that is in the classical music repertoire

Born in 1959 in Lisbon, Portugal  João Jeh-Oh Pedro Oliveira studied organ performance and composition at the Gregorian Institute of Lisbon and architecture at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon. In 1985 he moved to the United States as a Fulbright scholar with a fellowship from Gulbenkian Foundation where he completed two Master's Degree in Music and a Doctorate in Composition at the University of New York at Stony Brook.   He is presently the Corwin Chair of Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In writing Sequenza XIII for Accordion “Chanson”, Berio was immediately confronted with popular music immediately associated with the instrument and wrote "from the melody accompanying trips to the countryside to the songs of the working class, from night clubs to Argentine tango, to jazz".   The problem then arose of paying a common tribute to all these accordion traditions.  In this sense, the Sequenza XIII for accordion is a succession of accompanied melodies, in an always hushed atmosphere.  The accordion is initially polyphonic and then incorporates this music into the more 20^th century context.

This album The Wanderer is another phenomenal Pauline Oliveros re-issue from Important Records, 'The Wanderer' originally surfaced back in 1984 and is a collection of her seminal accordion work and a companion record to the hugely influential 'Accordion & Voice'. The first piece on the album which we are playing here Duo for Accordion & Bandoneon is a peculiar meditation in restrained playing and silence, sounds emerge from the instruments and then drop into nothingness just as quickly as they had arrived. It's strange but you begin to sink deeper and deeper into the quality of the room, the recording itself as you hear the two musicians (Oliveros is joined by bandolion player David Tudor) shuffling in their chairs and pressing their fingers against the keys. 

Estonian composer  Erkki-Sven Tüür was born in 1959.  His Prophecy is a concerto for accordion and orchestra written in 2007 and has a deep mystic background,  The title referring to the extremely long and rich practice through the history of different cultures and traditions of "seeing things".  The music reflects energetic levels of this phenomenom through a fine display of harmony and texture in a style all the composer’s own. While it is a concerto, the exhibitionism of the soloist is clearly subordinate to more serious aims.  

Svend Aaquist is a Danish composer and conductor.  Music greatly influenced by Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Pendereski.  He was one of the first Danish composers of his generation to move into electronic music and the use of computers for music performance.