I can see that look in your eyes. That thirst. “Please, Peter, regale us with esoteric information about contemporary accordion playing technique.” Absolutely. Let’s do this.
You see, for all the extremist ideologies social media and the Internet are amplifying, well, at least experimental accordion practitioners are finding each other, too. And maybe it’s worth listening to them. The keyboard is dominant now in electronic music, after all. And they make keyboard-based music sound different. For instance, there’s this beautiful work by Martin Lohse and Bjarke Mogensen, “Passing 1,” set to Hubble imagery:
And one 2013 gathering pulled artists and academics together to map the future of the instrument, in practical terms. They put out a full publication you can read:
Modern Accordion Perspectives [PDF]
(Mirrored on Google Drive, maybe try there first to give their bandwidth a break)
There are some real questions here – not only pedagogy and technique, but how the instrument survives in the 21st century. Much of this focuses on Europe, but there’s also a perspective on China.
There’s a burgeoning Facebook group, with, for instance, new music from Serbia:
Modern Accordion Perspectives @ Facebook
I thought this actually was worth sharing in the aftermath of losing Pauline Oliveros. And as it happens, filmmaker Roberta Cantow has created a documentary about the resurgence of the instrument.
More on that film here: