Output details

Accordion favourites

Research content/process:

This performance project aimed to extend the accordion repertoire and expand contemporary challenges to the instrument's conventional associations by bringing five new works specifically written for Knoop to performance and recording (the sixth by Laurence Crane is an older work originally written for Howard Skempton, and was chosen to contextualise the history of British experimental accordion writing). All not only make use of extended accordion techniques (utilising three different instruments) but also involve the performer's engagement with the composers and with the process of recording, editing and post-production. This engagement unfolds in a variety of different ways, resulting in a number of simultaneous methodologies for the project. In the de la Cour, a work whose musical material is based on a wheeze and which depends on musical allusions to Chopin and Pergolesi who both died of TB, Knoop was required to imitate an accordionist playing a cardboard accordion, accompanied by a respirator and a subliminal rendition of a traditional sea shanty. The levels of electronic distortion to which the music was subjected required the closest collaboration with both the compositional and recording phases of the project. Luck’s Liebestod is conceived for two vocalising accordionists, so that Knoop was required to develop appropriate – and accordion-friendly – vocal techniques, and again to engage with the recording process to develop suitable spatialisation techniques for the two accordions. Finnissy’s Walrus involved the overdubbing of no less than six accordions and required the simulation of differing acoustic spaces for its contrasting sections. Molitor’s Even so… made use of pitch shifting to extend the register of the instrument in an otherwise largely conventional texture. Newman’s Air Fool Agony Face utilises cut-up techniques on material from late Beethoven, stripping it of its romanticised context.