Incubation

Incubation — Production Process

In our subsequent meetings, we began discussing ways of notating specific fragments and exploring techniques that could emerge from or respond to the material presented during the initial session. This included further referencing ideas from the existing accordion repertoire, reinterpreting them in dialogue with the instrument and the evolving composition.

One such example appears in bars 15–16 of an early draft (Fig. 5). Here, Francisco initially envisioned a combination of preset chords played using the standard bass manual of the accordion.

This idea was clearly inspired by the technique used by Luciano Berio in his ‘Sequenza XIII’ (see Fig. 6), where the standard bass manual is treated outside its conventional accompanying role (Gartmann 2007).

Figure 6. Luciano Berio, ‘Sequenza XIII (Chanson) for Accordion’ (Universal Edition, 1995), p. 7 (with audio)

However, the construction of my instrument did not permit this specific combination of chords in the desired register — it was only possible one octave lower or two octaves higher. Therefore, I suggested adapting the material using the free-bass manual instead.

After experimenting, we arrived at a solution that granted more flexibility to the performer in choosing specific chords. The revised passage diverges significantly from Berio’s notation and reflects a move toward co-creative negotiation (Fig. 7):

When I received the first version of the score, entitled ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’, I immediately sensed that the title would play a crucial role in shaping the emotional and conceptual frame of the composition. The full line — ‘sí mi amiga, estamos bien, pero tiemblo’ [‘yes my friend, we are fine, but I am trembling’] — comes from a 1958 poem by Juan L. Ortiz (1896–1978). Later, the composer shortened the title to ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’. The reference to trembling — one of the keywords that had emerged in our very first session — seemed to close a conceptual loop, binding our early improvisations and discussions to a deeper poetic resonance.

What struck me most was that the poem was not a starting point for the composition. We had never discussed the title or the poem in our initial session, and it had not influenced my choice of fragments, my improvisations, or our language around the instrument. Francisco himself had no preconceived ideas about the poem until after that first meeting — it emerged after he had experienced the accordion. This makes the title especially significant: it did not impose a predefined narrative but rather arose organically from the shared space we had already begun to form.

Once Francisco introduced the poem to me, I began to realize that the composition’s structures, phrases, articulation, and images would all draw on it in one way or another. In our subsequent sessions — and in the foreword of the final score version — the composer confirmed this assumption: ‘The piece takes words, phrases, structures, and conceptual elements from the poem Sí, mi amiga by the Argentinian poet Juan L. Ortiz (1896–1978)’ (Corthey 2022).

Incubation – Insight

As our collaboration continued, it became increasingly clear that the poetic context began to influence not only the score but also performative strategies. What had first seemed like an inspirational reference gradually revealed itself as an essential insight.

Initially, I approached the score in a rather traditional manner. My main concern was the technical realization of the elements Francisco had tastefully incorporated into the composition. Many of these reflected the trembling character of the texture: switching between extreme registers, large leaps in both hands, sustained sounds, sounds bordering on silence, mechanical noises, and gestures such as the hand rubbing the instrument. All these techniques are inherently unstable and pose significant challenges for the performer.

In addition, some passages also required spoken text — fragments from Ortiz’s poem — to be whispered or spoken while playing or during brief pauses. Since I do not speak Spanish, I asked Francisco to read the lines aloud for me. At that moment, my intention was purely practical — to record the correct pronunciation so I could work on it during practice.

But what followed became unexpectedly important.

As Francisco read the poem to me (see Video 1), he did so in a quiet, simple, and unforced manner. The poem clearly held deep meaning for him, and he shared it not as an artistic instruction, but as a personal offering. That moment — his reading — proved essential for my understanding of the composition. Only later did I come to understand how this image stayed with me and began to inform my way of thinking about the piece — not as an instruction, but as a conceptual anchor — something that began to shape the way I approached the music and the instrument.

At the time, I did not yet grasp the significance of this moment. I only noted how central the notions of trembling, shivering, fragility, and balancing were — not just in the text of the poem, but in the score, in its structure, gestures, and how they inform specific playing techniques.

Figure 8. Francisco Corthey (2022) ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’, bars 2–3.

This excerpt from an early version of the score (Fig. 8) illustrates many of the elements mentioned above. The leaps between very low and very high tones, for instance, require rapid register changes in both hands. The vibrato effect marked on beat six in measure two is particularly difficult to achieve in the high register, which demands strong pressure on the instrument’s body. There are also sudden dynamic changes, which require full control of bellows movement, and the inclusion of spoken text, which must be carefully timed within the metric structure. The coordination required to perform this passage is intense: right hand, left hand, register switches, bellows movement, spoken voice — all must interact precisely. If everything aligns, the resulting sonic effect can be described as anxious, unstable, unsure, precarious sounds.

My initial practicing strategy was to study all these elements as thoroughly as possible and to focus on executing each connection exactly as written. I believed this would allow me to recreate the right character in the music, so that the audience could perceive the fragility written into the score. However, I also knew that this would require a high level of precision and motor-skills training in my practice. The process of performance would inevitably become automatized, potentially preventing me from actually experiencing the fragility myself. In other words, in order to convey the experience of instability to the listener, I would have to suppress my own vulnerability in performance — I would have to perform rather than experience most part of the composition.

This realization was particularly challenging, given that my embodied relationship with the instrument had been one of the driving forces behind the composer’s initial ideas. That relationship had suggested a particular kind of instrument-based physicality — one that was central to the character of the music — yet the precision required by the score seemed to push against the very conditions that had inspired it.

Thus, my early practices focused on developing motor skills specific to the work in order to gain control over technically challenging parts of the score. But as I kept thinking about the instrument-based physicality inherent in the idea of the music, I soon realized that it was even more important to let the instrument directly influence the performance. This means delegating some control to the instrumental specificity. 

I had to reassess my approach to practice and began focusing on deconstructing the relational field between myself and the instrument.

This is how I first tried to ‘unlearn’ it: I had the idea of letting the sounds emerge almost without intentionally producing them. The second step was to try to ‘disable’ some of the skills I would normally rely on during performance, to see whether this might allow for greater focus on the sound itself and help reveal its energetic potential. Francisco supported this idea. While I would still be responsible for controlling most parameters, some would depend entirely on the instrument and how my body interacted with it.

The following example illustrates this. The opening bar (Fig. 9, Video 2) shows a very long sound that begins dal niente and disappears into niente. When performing this fragment, I decided not to think of the sound as something to produce, but rather as something to discover, to find. In this case, I didn’t do anything to open the bellows; instead, I found the right position, waited, and let the sound emerge from within the instrument. It was my intention to merge my gestures with the sounds and let the latter guide my physical actions.

Figure 9. Francisco Corthey (2022) ‘estamos bien, pero tiemblo’, bar 1.

Video 2. Practicing session at the Grieg Academy, December 2021.

In the following weeks, I attempted to organize my practice in a way that combined these two aspects: motoric training aimed at reproducing the fragility expressed through the notation, and an openness to the freedom of sound — that is, discovering and accepting sounds rather than producing them.

It was challenging to reconcile these two approaches within a single performance narrative. Still, I tried my best to bring the motoric processes to the level of automatized algorithms which, I believed, would allow me greater freedom within the music. Although my practice and strategies were well developed, I still felt that something was missing. It seemed as if a crucial level of information remained inaccessible. As I reflect on my practice at this stage, the following points come to mind:

1. I could feel the divergences between the motor skills I had learned and the natural physicality of sound-producing gestures.
2. I accepted these divergences by distributing control over performance parameters between myself, the instrument, my body, and the score.

The process of learning to trust my instrument and embrace my physicality was not easy from a technical standpoint. Having let the sound guide my hand movement in the opening bar (Fig. 9), I could not predict how wide the bellows would be opened by the end of the bar. This meant that I could not be sure how I would start the following bars, which contained technically demanding leaps and precise metric structures.

I recognized this uncertainty as a kind of precarity in my performance — and I actually enjoyed it! Music began to be perceived through gestures and sounds, rather than through the score.

Video 3. Practicing session at the Grieg Academy, December 2021.

The problem was that, at the time, my conclusions still felt speculative — based more on intuitive hypothetical assumptions. I had not yet found the self-generating energy that emerges at the point of intersection between the performer’s narrative, the composer’s experience, and the concert situation which becomes a site of shared negotiation.

The composer, however, was satisfied with how his musical ideas had developed sonically, and we agreed that the piece soon would be ready for public performance.

This phase — situated within what Wallas would term Incubation — allowed ideas to develop gradually through exchange, adjustment, and the negotiation of constraints. Although the composition was not yet fully formed, a sense of direction began to emerge through our ongoing dialogue with the material, the instrument, external impulses and each other’s responses. In this state of partial clarity and ongoing discovery, certain themes and connections began to surface — quietly shaping the direction the composition would later take.

← previous

next →