Preparation

The first session was dedicated to the presentation of the accordion as a multifaceted instrument for contemporary music. My previous experience working with composers had allowed me to develop my own approach to introducing the instrument. [1] Rather than focusing on a demonstration of its capabilities, I chose to share my personal relationship with it. This did not mean avoiding basic information about playing technique, range, or sound production; instead, it implied a different way of understanding such fundamentals — one that foregrounded subjectivity and situated knowledge.

My approach was guided by a belief that an instrument is not merely a technical tool but a companion with its own agency, history, and affective presence. As Thor Magnusson (2019a) writes:

There is something magical about musical instruments: we pick them up, tune into their mode of communication, and we transcend into a different form of life. The instrument is what constitutes this possibility of a different thought and voice…

In line with this, I aimed to introduce the accordion not only as a physical and sonic object but as a social and aesthetic agent — bearing context, culture, and theory (see Magnusson 2019b) — deeply entangled with my own embodied knowledge.

During our first meeting, I performed for Francisco Corthey several examples from the contemporary accordion repertoire, explaining the relationship between specific techniques and the broader history around the instrument. I deliberately avoided the term ‘extended techniques’, arguing instead that all techniques arise from the nature of the instrument itself. Framing them as ‘special’ or ‘extended’ could downplay their integration within the instrument’s ecology.

My aim was not to be objective, but rather to offer a subjective, situated perspective — allowing Francisco to encounter the accordion through my personal lens. If I demonstrated a particularly difficult sound-production technique (for instance, a tone glissando), I would emphasize the fragility of the sound and the precarity of my contact with the instrument. I improvised extensively in this session, mostly using sparse material: very low and high tones, on the borders of sound and silence, unstable passages with occasional noises caused by tension between my body and the instrument, overtones from out-of-tune reeds, or the shortage of air in the bellows.

Some parallels can be drawn between this process and introducing one close friend to another. Besides mentioning a name and — eventually — occupation and some basic personal characteristics, one also inevitably reveals their own attitude and relationship to the person — even unintentionally. In this case, it was the accordion that was introduced to the composer, not neutrally, but as shaped through my lived experience with it.

Francisco had never worked with accordionists before, though he had studied relevant repertoire. Therefore, his perception of the instrument was inevitably filtered through my experience and my bias. Since I only played for him what was important to me, the image he formed was co-shaped by my particular way of playing, my musical choices, and not least by the limits of my technical skills.

At this stage, we did not discuss the structure of the piece or any specific compositional ideas. Still, we were already exchanging language — words that would later become central to our shared creative process and that ultimately influenced both the composer’s approach to the music, as well as my practice and my role in the further development of the composition. Reviewing the documentation from our first session and the conversations that followed, I began to notice a set of recurring keywords — gestures, really — that would go on to shape the composition’s sonic and emotional vocabulary.

These words later surfaced in the music itself, echoed in the following examples from the score (Fig. 3):

These words reflected not only the nature of the sounds I was producing, but also our emerging conceptual orientation. They marked a shared vocabulary — rooted in sonic experience, but stretching into aesthetic and emotional dimensions.

From the very first sketch of the score (Fig. 4), one can already see visual traces of this exchange. The emotional and structural content of the work appears to be drawn directly from the first presentation and from the language we had developed to discuss the instrument and its potential.

In the sketch, one can see references — direct or indirect — to techniques or fragments I had shown to Francisco and that he responded to. For example, the irregular wavy lines evoke the trembling effect found in Dmitri Kourliandski’s Shiver (2013) or in my own improvisations. Another reference to existing repertoire that influenced Francisco early on was the rubbing noise produced by the hand moving along the body of the instrument. I discovered and developed this technique while working on Sehyung Kim’s QI II, [2] where these noises appear in the final section, which does not contain any tones. In that passage, the right hand gradually moves along the keyboard from the top to the bottom, still trembling but without touching the keys, but with extreme tension to keep the gesture of shivering. This trembling effect became an essential technique in the piece, and during rehearsals with Sehyung we noticed how certain incidental sounds — rubbing, clothing fabric noise, mechanical clicks — emerged inevitably from the physical gesture. Rather than eliminating them, we decided to embrace and emphasize this gesture as part of the sonic texture. [3] 

When introducing the accordion to Francisco, I demonstrated this technique and shared its background. He was fascinated by the fragility of the sounds and particularly drawn to the gestural, physical nature of the technique. His early sketches and the first draft of the score reflected this interest, suggesting extensive use of such creaking sounds. However, as the piece developed, many of these were eventually replaced with more traditional materials. 

The reason for that was the extreme instability of the effect and its temporal inflexibility — the production of these sounds requires time, making it difficult to fit within metrically constrained textures. Still, this exploration left a strong imprint on the emotional and sonic identity of the composition.

It is important to note that none of these techniques were adopted for their own sake. Each visual representation in the early sketches reflected Francisco’s response to the sonic experience of our first session, filtered through his prior knowledge of contemporary accordion and the personal context shaping his compositional intent.

This first session illustrates what Wallas described as the Preparation stage: a period of immersion, investigation, and shared orientation. The composer’s thinking was clearly shaped by how I chose to present the accordion — to let him ‘meet’ it — what I emphasized, what I omitted, and how I performed. This personal approach allowed him not only to learn about the instrument but also about my personal and professional approach to it. Following Magnusson’s notion of the instrument as ‘a torch into our inner being’ (2019a), we could say that in presenting my instrument, I also presented myself — encouraging the composer to use not only accordion but also myself as a medium for a relational and responsive way of working with it.

The language we adopted during that first session — especially the recurring keywords — later became foundational to our shared approach to the co-creative work. They have also echoed back into my own practice, shaping how I engage with the instrument within the context of the composition. These challenges, and the way they have reshaped my relationship to the accordion, will be discussed in the following sections.

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[1] From 2010 to 2021 I was working with composers Pierluigi Billone, Hanna Eimermacher, José María Sánchez Verdú, Esaias Järnegard, Ivan Fedele, Tamara Friebel, Eva-Maria Houben, Sehyung Kim, Klaus Lang, John Palmer, Elena Rykova, Dieter Schnebel, Martin Schlumpf, Gérard Zinsstag, Ida Lundén, Boris Filanowski, Sergej Newski, Dmitri Kourliandski, Thomas Kessler, and Alfred Zimmerlin, and I premiered more than three-hundred and fifty works featuring the accordion.↩︎

[2] CD liner notes by Beat Furrer and Dan Albertson are available for download at: https://www.remusik.org/Downloadables/Edition/RE002L-BOOKLET+COVER-WEB.pdf [accessed 15 December 2024].↩︎

[3] CD information: https://www.discogs.com/release/15642521-Sehyung-Kim-Sergej-Tchirkov-Qi-II [accessed 15 December 2024]; video recording Tchirkov (2020).↩︎