Almost twenty-five years ago, in December, 1996, I took a trip to Staten Island to visit Guy Klucevsek, which resulted in this interview. If you sense a certain twerpish enthusiasm, the unguarded earnestness of a young ballplayer called up from the minors a little too early, please be kind. I had been out of college for about two years. I was at the peak of my infatuation with the accordion and with the music and people it led me to. It took a few more years of music business and life lessons before I acquired the prematurely wizened demeanor of a seasoned NYC veteran and a bit more of a skeptical ear towards the instrument.
Looking at this interview today, I think it not only captures my callowness, but the degree to which I was immersing myself in music from around the world, as filtered through the accordion, and the music that was happening in NYC’s downtown, which I was trying to participate in with the accordion as my calling card. Guy’s music was at the nexus of those two obsessions, and, as you will see in this interview, their source, since Guy’s playing on John Zorn’s The Big Gundown, the first Zorn record I heard at age 14, was one of my major inspirations for picking up the accordion. In Guy’s hands, the accordion seemed like a bridge between the old and the new, between folk traditions and edgy experimentation. It (mostly) shed its nerdy, campy associations and became a living, breathing tool for musical expression, like the “acoustic synthesizer” I sometimes imagined it to be. This interview gets inside both how Guy thought about the accordion’s bridging between worlds and my gratitude to him for that, and for welcoming me into his world.
Today, Guy and I are colleagues in the New England Conservatory of Music’s Contemporary Improvisation department. A few weeks ago, he asked me what had happened to this interview. It just so happens that I was in the process of cleaning up from a bookshelf collapse in my studio which had revealed my copy of Musical Performance, the journal that published it in 2001. Since Musical Performance seems to have vanished - it has disappeared not only from the internet, but even from the academic research resources at my disposal - I have posted it here.
For more information about Guy, please visit https://guyklucevsek.com/
***
There is probably no harder row to hoe in the music world than that of the avant-garde accordionist. Yet this is what Guy Klucevsek, and others, have been doing for decades. Currently living in New York City, Guy is widely recognized as the premier accordionist in new music. A virtuoso performer, a composer whose oeuvre stretches from rigorous applications of post-Cage technique to foot-stomping polkas, and a tireless champion of his fellow contemporary composers, Guy’s work continues to break new ground. In fact, the sheer range of the works Guy has commissioned defies categorization. It seems hardly possible that there could be another composer/interpreter of new music who so assiduously explores new areas, ranging from improvisation and minimalism to neo-classicism, post-modernism, and of course, polka.
I first became aware of Guy’s playing in 1987, when John Zorn’s “The Big Gundown,” a tribute to Italian film music composer Ennio Morricone, was released on the Nonesuch label. Guy performed “Poverty” from the Sergio Leone film “Once Upon a Time in America” on this recording. I date my interest in the accordion from the moment I heard this piece. Guy’s sound, the incredible richness, the depth of emotion in his playing, was a revelation.
In 1992 when Anthony Braxton told me that he wanted to hire Guy and myself to be the “accordion section” for some upcoming recording sessions, I was astounded. At this point, I had become a major Guy Klucevsek fan, and thanks to the initial inspiration I had received from his playing, had of course taken up the accordion myself. And at the behest of Mr. Braxton, I had also become quite serious about performing new music on it. To meet Guy, let alone play with him, was an awe-inspiring concept. When I met him, and he proved to be an incredibly friendly individual, with more than a little encouragement for what I was doing with the accordion, I was filled with even more inspiration.
In 1995 Guy called me to perform some accordion duo pieces with him. He had collaborated with the choreographer Victoria Marks on an outdoor dance piece at a park in the Bronx called Wave Hill. Like most of Guy’s pieces, the music was a wonderful mix of minimalist-influenced structures and folk melodies and rhythms. I was not used to playing music like this, but Guy quickly whipped me into shape as we spent many amazing summer days together playing for the dancers in that park. So our instruments would be in decent tune with each other he let me play one of his Giulietti accordions, the nicest I have ever heard, let alone played. All in all, the entire project was like a dream. I am self-taught on the accordion, but I think I learned more about playing the accordion in that short period with Guy than I had in the entire rest of my time with the instrument.
This interview is partially my way of thanking Guy for all that his music has meant to me. We met at his house in Staten Island, New York City on a Saturday afternoon on 21 December 1996.
REICHMAN: I thought we could start with the “Accordion Crimes/Misdemeanors” project. The other night I heard you perform the new suite “Accordion Misdemeanors” which you abstracted from the prize-winning score you composed for the audiobook version of E. Annie Proulx’s novel Accordion Crimes. I see this piece as really fitting very well into your oeuvre. Among the trends in your work is your use of different ethnic musics, including the music of your own ethnic background. One of the things this book is about is the way accordion music connects people to their roots, keeping them from being sucked into the mainstream. It’s like the ultimate Guy Klucevsek project. Could you talk a little bit about the genesis of this work?
KLUCEVSEK: When I read The Shipping News, which was E. Annie Proulx’s previous novel, the book jacket publicity for that talked about her working on her next novel Accordion Crimes. So even from the previous book I knew this was in the works, but I had no idea what it was going to be about. I thought it was going to be some kind of hokey mystery or something playing with the pop aspects of the accordion. Then when I read that it was coming out, since my wife Jan’s a librarian, I saw the pre-publication stuff. She told me that Accordion Crimes was due out any day, and I was getting all excited about it. It was totally coincidental that they were working on the audio book version of it. Though E. Annie Proulx didn’t know about me and neither did the publisher, the engineer (who works as a producer for them) Karen Perlman knew me because she used to do the sound for Lois Vierk’s concerts and Phil Niblock. She was familiar with the downtown scene. Normally they use stock music for these books, but she said, well Accordion Crimes, this calls out for original music, and if you’re going to use any you should use this guy I’ve worked with, Guy Klucevsek.
When I got the call, it was unbelievable, because I thought I was born to do this project. Then I received the pre-publication, a huge, three inch pile of 8.5xll sheets of the book itself, and then the edited version for the audio tape, because it’s four audio cassettes. I was floored by the concept of the book because it was like someone from our scene had written it. It had nothing to do with the accordion in popular culture, it was all to do with the accordion’s vitality in ethnic culture. I had written a prose piece for Keyboard magazine on regional musics of the Americas-it’s a scene I’m really interested in, it’s the music I listen to, and I know a lot of those people. So when I got the call, both Jan and I said I was born to do this project.
Because of the way the book is broken down it’s almost like eight short stories, each one of which is very specific to one ethnic culture in the U.S.A. What ties them together is this little accordion which is handed on from culture to culture. Most of the cues had to be 30 seconds to one minute. They serve as connecting units in the audio book. They come at the end of a story or to introduce the next story, so you have to create something that’s instantly recognizable. While a lot of the musics of these regions have made cameo appearances in my other pieces, like a phrase here, or a longer section of a piece, this had to be more like clear-cut miniature pieces, which had to be really identifiably of the ethnic group. That was the challenge.
I liked the pieces a lot when I finished them, and I wanted to make a suite out of them somehow. I reshaped things- they’re in a different order than they were for the book, some of them I expanded- adding a beginning section, a middle section, adding a variation to make them into concert pieces. It was using an old technique of mine: theme and variations. I created a theme for the Sicilian guy who makes the accordion at the beginning of the book and then used that theme for a lot of the other ones- how would this theme sound if it was played by a Cajun musician, or a Tex-Mex musician, or a German. I tried to translate it so that, like an old Hollywood score, the theme would be the hook that people would instantly recognize, and then the style would identify the culture of that specific chapter.
R: You’ve mentioned before how you often use theme and variations. For example, in “Viavy Rose Variations” you take that Malagasy melody and one of the ways you vary it is by thinking about how it would sound if a musician from a different ethnic group were playing it. When you get into a certain ethnic music, say when you are encountering Cajun music or Balkan music, how do you begin to incorporate that music into your own?
G: I think the way of using them is probably more subconscious, like most influences, and subtle things crop up that I only realize in retrospect. For instance one of the pieces for “Accordion Misdemeanors” is a Cajun/Zydeco piece, for the chapter that explores the existence of both white Cajun musicians, and the Black Cajuns who are into Zydeco, though they use different kinds of instruments. Cajun music uses dry tuning- no tremolo at all, and they play in octaves a lot. So, in the beginning of that Cajun piece, I use a stop which is in dry tuning, and I’m playing in octaves, and there’s a lot of accents off the beat, which is also very characteristic. Then I go into a boogie-woogie Zydeco section, and I hit the master switch which brings in a tremolo in the middle so there’s this little Zydeco variation at the end. That came from the fact that Cajun music consists mainly of waltzes and polkas, whereas Zydeco brings in blues and boogie-woogie and more pop culture things. So one variation was using the boogie-woogie pattern and the other was actually changing the sound of the instrument by plugging in the master switch and having it sound like someone had switched instruments in the middle of the piece. Sometimes those subtle things are realized only in retrospect. There’s an Acadian piece, Acadians in Maine, for “Accordion Misdemeanors.” You’re from Maine...
R: Though I never heard any accordion music when I was there.
K: I didn’t know that there was an Acadian community in Maine - her book brought that out. I knew they existed in other places in the U.S. When I was in Nova Scotia-there’s a whole Acadian tradition in Nova Scotia of people who settled there on their way to New Orleans, and one really characteristic thing about a lot of that music is piano accompaniment instead of accordion in some cases. There were some Scotch players who played piano. They mainly play accompaniment patterns, like stride piano, with left-hand octaves and right-hand chords. In that movement I tried to create one of those piano bass lines, so that the bass line was moving rather than just playing roots and fifths and it really sounded like a piano part. They also use dry tuning, so I use a switch with dry tuning. Normally we associate jigs and hornpipes and those sorts of things with Irish music or Scotch music but Acadian music has a type of very slow hornpipe that doesn’t exist in some of these other cultures. So to zone in and try to make it sound specifically Acadian I chose something with a slow tempo that didn’t conjure up Scotch or Irish. It’s those kind of little subtleties of the sound of the music, the sound of accordions they use. In the Tex-Mex piece, Tex-Mex players always use tremolo, sometimes two middle reeds, sometimes three. They love that vibrato sound and they sing with that vibrato sound. For the Tex-Mex piece I use two middle reeds which are out of tune with each other, and instantly within four notes, if I play the same notes on that stop, it sounds Tex-Mex. If I would play them on a straight stop it could sound Cajun.
R: For you, it’s not like a quotation where you use an actual piece. You don’t go into learning all these tunes.
K: It’s more superficial (laughs).
R: It’s interesting the way the “Accordion Misdemeanors” piece, like many of your recent pieces, has inspiration coming from so many places, being brought together in the accordion. Even though you’re a classically trained musician, so much of your music is coming out of your knowledge and interest in world musics. Did the accordion lead you to these other musics?
K: The unique thing about the accordion, at least in my relationship to it, is that it is an instrument which came right out of pop culture and it was first associated with folk musicians and later popular music. It’s really never had any visibility or impact on the concert music scene. That’s the most recent aspect of it. In some ways even being in the concert hall with the accordion is almost an oxymoron. My background is that my first accordion teacher was a guy who went door to door and taught lessons in the house, and I was learning stuff like “Tea for Two.” I would bet that in the United States you could count the number of accordion students who began with the idea of being a classical musician on both your hands. In Europe I think it’s probably a little more predominant but here it’s almost nobody. Usually if you started playing the accordion in the U.S. when you were a kid it was probably because your parents played it, or like me you saw it on television during the fifties, or you heard it on a pop record. It came out of pop culture somehow.
I moved to the Pittsburgh area after my parents got divorced and was raised by an aunt and uncle and had to switch teachers. The teacher that my parents got me there happened to be a classical teacher. So I was studying piano and violin transcriptions- Brahms, Tchaikovsky and so on, playing in competitions. But at the same time I was studying “El Relicario” and all these novelty pieces, so there was always a hybrid going on. And of course I was playing Slovenian polkas and waltzes on the weekends for weddings and parties in my community.
When I went to college I only studied classical music and I pretty much had to divorce everything else. It was getting to the point of having people call me “mister” so I could say ‘go ahead and call me Guy’. You had to get the respect first. In retrospect I think that’s what I had because I was a total snob in my twenties. I just wanted to know about playing new music, classical music, take no prisoners, long tones. I didn’t want to know from ethnic music or any of that stuff on the accordion, because that was the association anyway and it was almost the only association people had. So I didn’t listen to ethnic music for all of my twenties and most of my thirties.
Then I think a couple of things happened. I went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1980 and heard a Black accordion player for the first time in my life. You don’t normally associate African-Americans with the accordion, but in New Orleans it’s a tradition. I saw ten bands and they were all led either by Cajuns or Black Cajuns. That was a revelation. The adulation that these people had! I mean people were screaming and yelling and cheering and whistling and the accordion players were the bandleaders and the singers and wrote most of the tunes. It was really vibrant wonderful music that was not in any way old-fashioned or pandering to the masses. It was the music of their culture and it was really exciting. Because what had happened to Slovenian-American music was that it became totally popularized. It became part of mass culture. Frankie Yankovic [the most famous Slovenian-American polka bandleader] was doing movie theme polkas, polka versions of 2001 and Sound of Music. It had nothing to do with being Slovenian anymore. It had to do with making money and selling records. I heard Cajun music in 1980 and then bought some records too, at a time when they were not easy to find. They were not on major labels-they were on small local labels. So I brought some Nathan Abshire recordings home.
From Cajun music I got interested in Tex-Mex music. From there I got interested in South American accordion music. And then from meeting Arto Lindsay I was introduced to Brazilian accordion music. From that I got interested in Dominican accordion music, Colombian accordion music, the Argentine bandoneon music. That part of it came sort of late in life, in my forties, really. It was then that I started to get really interested in and familiarized with these non-European musics. It started to seep its way into my music in around ‘86. Right after I toured with [John] Zorn I wrote “Scenes From a Mirage,” and that was the first solo I wrote which had more than one style in a piece. That was a complete break from my past. It still sounded like me, but it had references outside of classical music for the first time ever in my work.
Both of those innovations I attribute directly to Zorn opening me up during the Cobra tour, making me quote things. In Cobra there are the fencing systems- you have to quote. You have to play something stylistic. It’s supposed to be generic. Play tangos, play polkas, play waltzes, whatever was associated with the accordion. That’s when I started dredging into the trash in my past and searching for whatever gold there was.
R: Speaking of the “Cobra” project, many listeners probably know you best from your work with Zorn and other people from that “downtown” scene. Your music, however, is extremely different from that usually associated with John Zorn, Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp and company. For one thing, many of those musicians are heavily involved with improvisation, which you are not. But also, starting from your early minimalist works right up to your recent pieces, which are usually tonal and highly melodic, your written music bears little resemblance to that of other downtown musicians. Do you feel you fit in with that scene? What attracted you to them, since you were coming from such a different place in your own music?
K: The breakthrough for me was that these people were all composer-performers. When I had played with people before in chamber music groups, even if it was a new music chamber ensemble where everyone was a performer, usually I was the only person in the group who was a composer as well. We were playing specific chamber music pieces where all the parts were totally written out. I first heard John Zorn in 1984 at New Music America in Hartford. They were doing “Rugby” which had four performers and a prompter. I was totally blown away by it. It hit me on every level. It hit me on the gut level, it hit me intellectually, it hit me viscerally. I saw that all the performers were making the decisions of what to play and when to play it. I could tell that by what was going on in the group. And even though I had never improvised like that in my life, I was just so excited by what was going on creatively on stage. I had big arguments with the people I was with who just hated it. They just hated it! I was with two people at the time: one was an American musician I respect who said it was a total sham and what a disappointment it was that some people would actually buy into this. The audience loved it, by the way. And the other person was a German guy who said, “Well, Americans are so gullible. We in Germany wouldn’t be fooled by this stuff.”
R: If only he could see the future.
K: And then the next thing that happened was that I ran up on stage and told Zorn how much I loved it and he told me he was a fan. And I told him if you ever need an accordion please include me in. The next year he wrote “Cobra” and included me in it and the first place we went was Germany to do a tour, playing for 2500 people. So much for the Germans not being gullible.
I was floored. Everybody on stage was a composer, making up their own parts. I had never been in a situation like that before. In Relâche [Philadelphia-based new music ensemble] we played a lot of things that were what we called “performer choice” pieces, by Daniel Goode, Pauline Oliveros, Malcolm Goldstein, where you have a set of materials, like in Terry Riley’s “In C.” You’re not really improvising. Every note is set by Riley, but you decide when to move on. You’re listening carefully and you’re making compositional decisions, but you’re not making up any of your own vocabulary.
So I got into that Lower East Side scene through the excitement of New Music America in 1984 and hearing that piece and then playing Cobra. That’s when I met Christian Marclay and Elliott Sharp, Bill Frisell, the band from heaven. These are all great musicians: Wayne Horvitz, Bobby Previte, Carol Emmanuel, Zeena Parkins. It was an ear-opening experience. Anthony Coleman. These are people that I worked with and in some cases I’m still working with twelve years later. Then, at a certain point I started improvising with some of these people and at some point I realized I was in over my head. I’m not a free improviser and I don’t get a great deal of enjoyment out of sitting on the stage and composing everything in real time. I’m not that good at it. Some people think I am, but I don’t have a vocabulary for it. A great deal of the compositional pleasure for me comes from sitting at home with the instrument and painstakingly playing phrases over and over. For me that’s the excitement. It wouldn’t be too exciting for an audience to watch me working that out on stage.
Yet I like that whole scene. I like the fact that these are composer-performers and composers think in a different way when they play from the way performers think. They’re not after physical perfection or realizing something in an exact and pristine way. They’re after a certain kind of energy. I like the way they listen. I like they way they respond. Sometimes they’re not as strong technically on their instruments as the performers who specialize in performing and that can be a little frustrating. Sometimes their intonation is not as good, sometimes their reading skills are not as good, but they make up for it with fantastic ears. And it’s a great support network, too. I also found these people, Elliott, John, Anthony, to be much more widely versed in the kind of music that they listened to and that they were influenced by and that they accepted. They seemed to be almost total non-snobs about music. And so it allowed me to drop my hair and admit to some of the things that I liked. You know, I had always liked film scores but I had always been ashamed to admit it because I always thought there was ‘serious’ composing as opposed to people who wanted to make money and wrote film scores. I always loved Bernard Herrmann’s film scores. I always thought he was a genius but I could never admit it, because you know, he “sold out,” he didn’t do his symphony career. He went to Hollywood instead. Part of being able to write “Scenes From a Mirage” was to admit into my vocabulary film music as a technique, a way of taking a theme and putting it stylistically through the wringer and seeing what new avenues that would lead to. That wouldn’t have happened without contact with Zorn, who loves film scores and has thousands of records of it.
R: A lot of these things you’re talking about which attracted you to these people are skills and attitudes and techniques that are derived from jazz. You never really stepped into the jazz world. There’s that amazing Bill Frisell record you play on, “Have a Little Faith.” You’re noticeably absent from the more jazz-oriented tracks.
K: Well, you know I didn’t grow up as either a rock musician or a jazz musician. Bill grew up as a clarinetist and playing guitar. As a clarinetist I think he experienced the classical and as a guitarist he experienced r&b and rock & roll and all that. My upbringing both musically and culturally was almost totally devoid of pop music. I mean in high school, I knew the Beatles, I didn’t know the Stones. I didn’t know anything. In college I knew Bob Dylan. I was a lefty, still am. Bob Dylan was like the only person; some Judy Collins and some Joan Baez; that was it. It was from the social perspective. I didn’t know and still don’t know any rock & roll from that era other than the Beatles. It was almost like I grew up in a cocoon or something. So, no, I don’t have those references and that’s why there’s sort of a blind alley in getting too involved with the free improv scene for me.
As a performer, however, there are ways that I can be used. I found that the best results I’ve had working with people from that scene are people with really strong compositional ideas. Zorn is brilliant at codifying compositional techniques from that vocabulary. He can work with anybody from any background. When he works with the Kronos Quartet he writes everything out, because he knows what their strengths are and what they like to do. He brings out their strengths, he doesn’t try to make them struggle with his aesthetic. He wants them to look good as well as representing what he does. When he wrote for me he wrote a virtuoso piece that had lots of notes, that was fun. He knew that would be something I would dive into and I did. Anthony Coleman- It worked out well with him because he has a really strong, rigorous compositional technique as well as being a brilliant improviser. Those were the most successful ventures. Just sitting on stage and free improvising with people is not the most successful thing that I can be involved in. But there are definitely ways that I can work with people there who can find ways to use my skills.
R: I’m curious about how the solo piece Zorn wrote for you, “Road Runner,” came together. Like a lot of Zorn’s music, this is an incredibly virtuosic piece covering tons and tons of stylistic ground in a very short period of time. How did he know you would be able to execute all the stuff he threw in there?
K: John just said, “Show me everything that’s possible to do on the accordion,” and he wrote down every single possible technique and used every one of them in the piece. He didn’t discard any of them. This was like a trash heap of modern culture. I don’t think he knew much about my background. He knew I was trained as a classical musician. Sometimes he would write, “quote tango, quote polka, quote waltz,” and then it would just have eight seconds over it. Those quotes I picked usually had personal connections. Using that kind of notation was enough to bring in some personal references, but I don’t think he brought in anything. He definitely used every sort of technique. Every one that I showed him without exception showed up in the piece.
R: He also knows accordion music pretty well. He’s a big accordion fan in his own way.
K: He’s a big everything fan. It’s like a catalogue of accordion music and non-accordion music.
R: You have a new project celebrating a spectrum of accordion musics, the Accordion Tribe. Would you like to discuss the evolution of this group?
K: Well, my agent in Europe, Lutz Englehardt, asked me two years ago if I had any new projects I’d like to reveal to an unsuspecting public, and I said that I had this dream to put together an all-accordion player bill made up of composers from five different countries. He said it sounded great and asked who they were. I said Maria Kalaniemi from Finland, Lars Hollmer from Sweden, Bratko Bibic from Slovenia, myself, and a fifth person to be determined later. He suggested Otto Lechner from Austria and sent me a CD and I said ‘yes, he’s the man’. I wanted five players who were composers and were from five different traditions and five different places. I got in touch with all these people and they were all interested. The idea was that we would play only our own music, everything from solos to quintets, whatever seemed to make the most sense, and we would do a tour in Europe.
So, in May and June of 1996 we did a three-week tour of Europe and Scandinavia. We made a lot of radio broadcasts and put together a CD. It was great. Lars Hollmer had a bunch of tunes that he arranged for all five of us, so at the end of the concert it was all five of us wailing away for about 30 minutes, playing quintet tunes. I always loved Lars’s music. I first heard it about 12 years ago. He’s an autodidact, self-taught on a bunch of different instruments. He plays accordion, piano, synth, guitar and some woodwind instruments. He’s just phenomenal. He has a home recording studio. The way he creates his pieces is by layering them on tape. His studio is his composing tool. He doesn’t read or write music. But his pieces are really complex, with unusual meters, meter changes, counterpoint, lots of contrasting lines on top of one another. I was really interested in him as a composer.
Maria I was really interested in as a performer. I just thought she was a phenomenal performer. I love the way she plays the instrument. She mainly did a solo set on the program. Bratko Bibic I had shared a bill with once in Belgium. He’s, like, the post-modernist of the accordion.
R: Coming from you!
K: Yeah! He was saying that he and I are like opposite sides of the coin, because he IS Slovenian, he lives in Ljubljana. He’s trying to do everything he can to shatter the folk music of his country. I’m Slovenian-American. I grew up in the United States and a lot of my music is celebrating the music that everyone he knows is trying to live down. It’s as if I’m striving for my past and he’s striving for his future. But somehow, they’re complementary. The only American equivalent to Bratko I can think is Anthony Coleman. His pieces are disjunct and they have a totally obsessive quality which Anthony also has. The difference is that Bratko is also self-taught. He doesn’t read or write music. So there’s a really naive quality to his music, but the pieces are very sophisticated. He was definitely the most exploratory of the five of us on stage. He improvises somewhat- he’s been in improvising groups with Tom Cora, had a band called Nimal that did several albums, and he’s now got a group called the Madleys. He’s got a really strong compositional voice, he puts his pieces together really painstakingly. They’re wonderful compositions.
Otto Lechner is a blind accordion player from Vienna. He comes from a jazz tradition but he’s not really a traditional jazz player. He does play some standards: he did “Caravan” in a very individualistic way. He wrote a piece called “The Three Quarter Suite” which is a suite of waltz tunes, very funny tunes, lots of ‘ur-waltz’ rhythms, larger than life. Very witty. And he also sings incredible digeridoo drones and Jew’s-harp things like “doing-da-da-doing” in these really deep bass notes with his playing. He’s a really infectious performer on stage. I can say definitely, with no argument from the other performers, that he was the hit of the tour. His solo pieces brought down the house every night. He’s a phenomenal technician, flawless time. Wonderful compositions. His pieces are out of the jazz tradition, but as he said in Vienna he doesn’t really have a circle of friends he can play with, because his stuff is just too outside of that tradition though it’s what he comes from.
Lars is a combination of Scandinavian folk music and new music, and Maria is definitely out of the Finnish folk music scene. Bratko represents a combination of European folk music and postmodern, just as mine is sort of a world accordion thing and postmodern. Otto was really the one person who came out of the jazz world. There were several pieces where he was playing over changes he had written, creating his own ‘standards’. It was a really interesting bill. What I liked about the project was that piece after piece was a killer composition. There was not a weak piece on the program. As a composer, I didn’t want this program to be about virtuosity, I wanted it to be about music. What I really was happy about was that the level of music on the program was consistently high. And then listening to the tapes that we were editing for the recording and the finished project just brought it home to me that they (the composers) were really five good choices. I think the recording holds up really well and celebrates the creative side of the instrument.
R: Yeah, it sounds amazing. We’ve got to hear it in the US.
K: Well, we’re working on it. One of the amazing things was just that the instruments are so different. Bratko and Otto have these very low-tech Hohners which have vibrato up the wazoo, lots of tremolo, very small, lots of noise. Every time we tried to amplify Bratko’s instrument, it was like trying to get the sound of the reeds to be louder than the sound of the buttons and the keys. He’s from Slovenia and he doesn’t have much money. The economy there is in bad shape and German instruments cost a fortune for them to buy. So he has what he can afford. Lars has this amazing Swedish machine which has no stops on either hand. It is what you can get. We used to kid him that the instrument is so loud, with its three middle reeds, that we would get him a dis-amplifier box so he could be softer acoustically. And Maria had this very, very sweet sounding Bugari instrument with a very tasteful tremolo- a very beautiful, almost classic sounding instrument but with a sweet touch of tremolo. And mine was this very big Giulietti classic sound, a real concert sound. We did one piece of Otto Lechner’s called “The Winter Solstice Song” in which we all play in unison. Playing very long tones in this very slow moving melody, the tuning was pretty close, so we didn’t have too many problems with that. And the sound of these five timbres on stage at one time playing this unison chordal line was just stunningly gorgeous, really beautiful.
R: On to another stunningly gorgeous sounding band that you have, the strings plus accordion quartet called the Bantam Orchestra. This group has two records out, including your most recent CD, “Stolen Memories,” which is on Zorn’s Tzadik label. This is the first ensemble you’ve led with classical instruments that I know of. After having the polka band, what brought you to do this particular project?
K: Originally, as with many of my composed projects, it was a dance commission. Ninety percent of the commissions I get to write music are from dancers. In 1990 I was commissioned to write a piece for Angela Caponigro, who was one of Laura Dean’s dancers and was doing some choreography of her own at the time. I could tell that what she was getting at was a very pure, classical sound, so I put together a trio of violin, cello, and bass, with myself on accordion. I wanted an all-string sound that could be entirely non-vibrato if I needed it. I wrote a piece called “Passage North” for that band. Three of the pieces are on the first Bantam Orchestra recording, “Citrus, My Love.” Secondly, I’d toured for four years with electric bands, both my own and other people’s, with drums, electric guitar and electric bass. I had come back from tours with severe tendinitis, as the sound checks had felt like 45 minutes of me trying to bring the accordion up to the mezzo-forte level of the band. I would come back really frustrated acoustically and physically. I wanted an acoustic band for my own sanity and to be able to balance things on stage without monitors. Even if we were going to play amplified to be able to hear each other on stage without having to depend on monitors. So I decided to expand the repertoire for that group. I took some other pieces, like “Citrus, My Love,” which was a larger piece that had originally been written for accordion and violin doubling viola, but I re-orchestrated it for the accordion, violin, cello and bass combination. And then I started doing some pieces where I was doubling on piano. I started playing some piano in about 1990. I know enough to write myself easy parts that I can play, and devise them so I can switch instruments in the middle of pieces. First of all, accordion and strings blend beautifully, and with clarinet. There’s something about the timbres that just blend right in.
R: Don’t rule out brass and accordion- I think it’s an underrated combination.
K: This is the next area of exploration for me, I agree. Especially trumpet - muted trumpet maybe.
R: And trombone.
K: Muted trombone. Muted everything and accordion. Have you been working with brass bands?
R: I have a duo with a Swiss trombone player, Roland Dahinden. I’ve always thought that accordion and brass are a good combination. I think of it as a real German, central-European sound. It conjures up the real oom-pah sound with the tuba. I think it really has a lot of potential. I would love to write for accordion and brass ensemble, it’s one of those ideas lurking in my brain.
K: Yeah, so now I’ve written two albums’ worth of material for the Bantam Orchestra and I’m actually still writing. After I came back from the Accordion Tribe tour some of the tunes of Lars Hollmer’s that I learned on the tour I liked so much that I’m now arranging a set of three pieces of his for the Bantam Orchestra. Some of the [Burt] Bacharach pieces I did for Zorn in solo arrangements [for a compilation of Bacharach tunes in the Tzadik label’s Radical Jewish Culture series] may find themselves in the Bantam repertoire because Bacharach seems to cry out for accordion and strings. I’m arranging some other pieces of mine that were for other combinations for this orchestra. I love the sound of the band. It’s a stunning sound and it’s one, if I ever got another gig, I would like to explore some more.
R: Have you written any pieces for ensembles that you don’t play in?
K: Some. I had a commission earlier this year to do a two piano piece for Double Edge. I wrote a series of miniatures called “Cameos” which also reflect some of the solo music in that it’s six different miniature pieces influenced by various music. Two of them sound sort of like chorale pieces. One of them sounds like a Javanese gamelan. One of them is a combination of tango and gospel called “Tango’ed in Gospel.” Another one is a merengue tune in 7/8 called “Balkan Merengue.” My interest in combining genres is reflected in the piano piece. A couple of years ago I did an arrangement of a Beatles tune for Aki Takahashi for her Beatles collection. For Ping Chong I wrote some vocal pieces that didn’t have an accordion in them. I did a toy piano piece for Margaret Leng Tan. Ninety percent of my work is accordion-oriented in some fashion or another. I seem to be at this point the performer most interested in playing my own music.
R: In some of your early pieces you were really coming out of the post-minimalist thing, working with acoustical phenomena, repetitions, really rigorous structures. And now you’ve moved into using world music influences in polystylistic pieces. Do you ever go back and use the more experimental techniques, such as the acoustical phenomena?
K: Not as isolated pieces. “Scenes From a Mirage” ends with these high piccolo tones that I’m trying to get difference tones out of.
R: Like in “Skating on Thin Air,” which we played together.
K: While it’s now not the study for the whole piece, it’s become part of the vocabulary. I don’t think it was a disowning of the aesthetic. I found that I wasn’t able to create a great deal of variety within that language. I found myself at a dead end. At one point I was supposed to give a ninety minute concert and I looked and I said, “Well, I can’t put this piece with this piece because they’re pretty much the same piece, they just have a different instrument. Oh, so does this piece over here.” They were all pretty much what I would call intellectual minimalism. They were based on structures; they were very formalist. Some of them were very beautiful and I like them, but I think compositionally I was at a dead end. I wasn’t breaking any new ground either for myself or for the aesthetic. It was more that when I wrote “Scenes From a Mirage” and “The Grass it is Blue,” which came around the same time, it was like finally finding my voice at age 40. I was finally able to meld somebody who was interested in formal techniques and minimalism with somebody who played an instrument out of pop culture; to find a way not to be a pop musician and not to be writing generic minimalism. Whether it was strong or wonderful or whatever would take care of itself, but it felt like I finally had found a voice. And that’s what was exciting. I gained some listeners and lost some listeners from that. Some of my fellow composers thought it was a sell-out, but a sell-out to what? One doesn’t know.
***
this interview originally appeared in
The Accordion In All Its Guises
Musical Performance Journal Volume 3 Parts 2-4
Editors: Basil Tschaikov and Malcolm Miller
OPA (Overseas Publishers Association)
Harwood Academic Publishers, 2001