"I walk onto the concert
stage holding an Accordion:
Strike one against me.
For over an hour I perform contemporary
works:
Strike two against me.
Time and time again I face this
challenge with fierce determination, seeking at least a base hit each time.."
JOSEPH
MACEROLLO
By Matthew Clark
[Reprinted from the Oct, 1980 edition of
Keyboard Magazine]
ACCORDIONISTS, IN ALL likelihood, do not suffer from
persecution complexes more than any other group of normal citizens, but
every now and then, when you hear one of them wondering in bewilderment
why the accordion has not shaken its image as a cornball instrument, in
the other-wise chic world of modern keyboards, you sense the frustration
that many of this lot must occasionally feel, along with the humor that
helps them cope with the situation.
Take Joseph Macerollo, one of the most respected figures
in the progressive fringe of the accordion community. On the liner
notes to his album Interaccodinotesta, this internationally-acclaimed artist,
this veteran of recitals and performances with a long list of contemporary
chamber ensembles, was moved to write the lines that hang like a despairing
cloud above. Seldom has a baseball metaphor been given such a glum
application.
Despite these odds, though, Macerollo has been batting
nearly 1,000 in the Avant-Garde League, thanks to his masterful work with
the Giulietti Bassetti free-bass or chromatic accordion, his Louisville
Slugger. Thus equipped, he has appeared in concert with a variety
of respected conductors, like Victor Feldbrill, Boyd Neel, Szymon Goldberg,
and Luciano Berio, and with such instrumental aggregations as the Orford
String Quartet, the Purcell String Quartet, the Toronto Symphony String
Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Ensemble, and the Vancouver Chamber
Orchestra. In 1975 he chaired the International Accordion Symposium
in Toronto, with Yuri Kazaakov, Hugo Noth, James Nightingale, Alain Abbott,
and other well-known artists in attendance. When not teaching at
Queen's University, the University of Toronto,.or the Royal Conservatory
of Toronto, he frequently performs modernistic works written for him by
some of Canada's top composers. In addition to all this, he has published
a valuable reference volume, The Accordion Resource Manual [Avondale Press,
P.O. Box 451, Willowdale, Ontario M2N 5Tl Canada]. Given the critical
acclaim he has won, you might say that Macerollo has scored a free-bass
hit.
Although he is known mainly for his work with contemporary
music, Macerollo's heritage as an accordionist is in the conservative traditions
of the instrument. Born in Guelph, Ontario, sixty miles west of Toronto,
he was steered toward the accordion by his parents, who were eager for
him to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, an accordion player specializing
in wedding gigs for local Italian families. By the age of eleven,
he was leading his own combo. "A friend of mine used to pick me up
and literally put the accordion on my lap," Macerollo laughs. "I
used to play for four hours almost nonstop at these weddings. I was
one of those zombie players."
Before long, young Joey was expanding his field, playing
at political functions, switching from Liberal to Conservative rallies
night after night during elections, and charity fund-raisers; for seventeen
years he performed for the Ontario Reformatory. It wasn't until 1963
that his horizons expanded beyond Guelph, however. In that year he
won the Canadian Accordion Championships, and on the strength of that victory
he was sent to the World Accordion Championships, where, in successive
years, he placed ninth and fourth.
Meanwhile, Macerollo was pursuing his academic degree,
and in 1965 he graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of
Toronto. Originally he had been a piano major, but he dropped that
major because his heart was more with bellows than with strings.
No accordion major was available, however, so Macerollo wound up earning
his degree in musicology. He did manage to squeeze in one performance
on his favorite instrument, a performance that earned him his first teaching
post.
"In '65, because nobody really knew I played accordion,
I asked to do a solo recital on accordion," he remembers. "Of course
hardly anybody came, but one person who did was Dr. Boyd Neel [formerly
Principal of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto]. I didn't know him
personally, but he asked Richard Johnson, who was head of the Conservatory
Summer School, to ask me if I would be interested in teaching accordion.
I always remember Dr. Johnson's remarks. He said, 'I hate accordion,
and I don't know why there should be a place for it, but nevertheless I'll
go along with it, since my boss wanted me to ask you.'" Swept up
by the enthusiasm of the proposal, Macerollo accepted the offer, and in
the summer of 1967 he began his teaching career before six young students.
Macerollo's concert career began picking up at about the
same time. In January 1967 he premiered the first accordion concerto
ever written by a Canadian. The composer, Morris Surdin, had been
commissioned by Boyd Neel, who conducted the debut performance with Macerollo
and the Hart House orchestra in Toronto. Five months later they presented
it again, at the Canadian pavillion in the Montreal Expo; this performance
was recorded and later broadcast by Radio Canada International.
Since then, Macerollo has earned his M.A. in musicology,
recorded a number of albums, and organized a syllabus at the Royal Conservatory
on free-bass accordion.
Just to reassure ourselves that free-bass on an accordion
had nothing to do with illegal drug mixtures, we began with an attempt
to clarify just what it is.
* * * * * * * *
What exactly does the term "free-bass accordion"
mean?
It refers to an arrangement of single-note buttons on
the left hand, which allows for a pitch range of anywhere up to six and
a half octaves, so you would think almost like a pianist. The only
thing is, on a piano you think of the keys as two rows moving in semitones,
more or less, whereas on the accordion we have three rows on the left hand,
so you are moving in three rows of semitones, but it's all chromatically
arranged. These buttons give us a fantastic range. They are
also close together, so we can get a wider span than on the piano.
It also differs from the piano in that the tone quality of the two manuals
is different, the sort of nasal quality you get in the left hand and the
quality of sound on the right are quite dissimilar, so you have to think
of them as two completely separate manuals. And there's a slightly
different thinking process involved in terms of how you move on keys and
how you move on buttons. The touch is also a bit different.
Don't most accordions have chord buttons for the
left hand?
That's the system you normally find. Everybody
has an accordion in their closet, so to speak - the standard accordion,
on which you play all your waltzes and polkas for dances. Basically
the left hand on that accordion is arranged as a folk instrument diatonically
in fifths. Take a bass note, let's say C, on the left hand.
The note you have above it is a G, and above the G is a D, so it's arranged
in the cycle of fifths. Then below the C is the F, and below the
F is the Bb. Now each one of these bass note buttons has corresponding
buttons to produce a major chord, a minor chord, a seventh chord, and a
diminished chord, so you can play boom-chank-chank, boom-chank-chank in
any key.
How wide a range do the single-note buttons cover?
The single-note range is only an octave. In fact,
it's less than an octave. It doesn't produce an actual scale, as
you have on the piano or the free-bass accordion. Some people have
tried to give the illusion of that through skillful changing of registers,
but that's not the same thing really. Our registers on the left hand
allow you a soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. But it's really an awkward
thing, because you have to switch among them while you're in movement.
And the free bass solves that problem?
It solves all that without necessarily relying on switches.
So before you started on the free-bass accordion
. . .
I was on the standard accordion. The kinds of things
I actually played on my recital in '65 were contemporary pieces written
for standard accordion. I was always partial to contemporary music.
I was raised on polkas and waltzes, and I played all the transcriptions,
the mutilated versions of orchestral works of the nineteenth century, badly
transcribed. I used to play all these things. Although I enjoyed
it, I felt that in the light of my musical experience it was a redundancy,
and I was very frustrated by it. So when I heard that people were
writing original music for the standard accordion I started playing it.
I played things like Paul Creston's Prelude And Dance, AlexanderTcherepnin's
Partita, Marlon Lockwood's Sonata Fantasia, and a Rondo by Otto Leuning.
A lot of very fine people in the States had been commissioned to write
by the American Accordionists Association. The Association was in
some ways doing the right thing, but I felt that in other ways it wasn't.
They were commissioning these pieces in order to say that we are getting
idiomatic music for the standard accordion and that therefore the standard
accordion should be the classical accordion. In actual fact they
should have been commissioning these fellows to write for the free-bass
accordion.
When you began teaching at the Royal Conservatory,
how did you go about devising an instructional program?
There was a committee of three people, including myself,
that set up a syllabus for free-bass accordion. Basically I worked
with ten or twelve composers in Canada. They gave us seven or eight
hundred pages of music written at the elementary level, from, say, beginner
stages to intermediate, and even a couple of advanced things. Boosey
& Hawkes [30 W 57th St., New York, NY 10019] published a few of them,
but Waterloo Music [dist. by Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 866 Third
Ave., New York, NY 10022] agreed to publish about eighty percent of it.
What kind of pieces were they?
They were all original pieces. We ended up doing
transcriptions of some things like Mozart's earliest keyboard works, but
nothing from the Romantic period; we stayed away from that. It was
either Baroque or very early elementary Classical period works. We
also stayed away from anything idiomatic for the piano. Then came
all the contemporary music. We actually were way in front of the
instructional programs for a lot of other instruments in making a transition
to contemporary music, since the accordion was something of a new instrument
in terms of being formally taught. Our study books, for instance,
are not dexterity drills, like Hanon and Czerny, but studies in compositional
technique. So a student of eight or nine is already playing things
in polytonal keys, and we've got them playing twelve-tone works.
Do you teach both standard and free-bass at the
Conservatory?
No, we only examine and teach on the free-bass accordion,
with the result that we've alienated almost 99 percent of the accordion
world. Pretty much everybody plays the standard accordion.
But this did put some pressure on the very aggressive-minded young people
coming up, and a number of teachers made the transition after looking very
carefully at what we're doing.
How has the accordion scene changed since you began
your program at the Conservatory?
In 1970 the first accordion major was accepted at Queen's
University, and that was free-bass. And in 1972 the Faculty of Music
at the University of Toronto instituted the accordion major. Since
then it has been all uphill. I've got six accordion majors at U.
of T. right now, and six at Queen's. You can use the accordion as
a major at the University of Calgary. We've had about fifteen works
written for accordion and varying combinations at an advanced level.
There are three Canadian works for accordion and string quartet, three
works for accordion and string orchestra, two works for accordion and four
synthesizers, two works for accordion and five percussion instruments,
and two works for accordion and guitar. All of these pieces have
been performed as well.
You must be pleased by the progress being made in
your field.
If you had asked me ten years ago what I thought could
be accomplished in a decade, I would have never believed we could have
done as much as we have. It's gone three times faster than I expected.
But there are areas where there's a lot of work to be done. For instance,
we're such an isolated group, and this is such an isolated phenomenon,
that nobody really knows about what s happening other than the highly specialized
people who are working in it. The general commercial public is not
aware of what we're doing. Little by little I think these opportunities
will open up. The accordion is an image thing. You'd be surprised.
You tell somebody you play the accordion, and right away you re branded.
You might as well be in the same category as a banjo or bagpipes or something
like that. It's sort of a non-serious instrument, or it's not usable
in a jazz sense.
There are some well-known jazz players, though.
Sure, you have fine players like Tommy Gumina, who played
for [clarinetist] Buddy De Franco over the years. Gordie Fleming,
who's now living in Toronto, is a very, very fine and generally tasty accordionist.
The person we know most is Art Van Damme, who told me that he can't even
go to the bathroom at Customs without hearing his music. His is typically
the Muzak accordion sound. Then there's Dick Contina, who's the showman
type. But he's limited the accordion thing because he sings, he performs
with his kid and he's into some piano work. He's seen by a lot of
people, but he's not a good accordion player; he's a very bad one.
And then you get people like Myron Floren, who could have done a lot for
the accordion. You would think that he and Lawrence Welk, given the
opportunity of their show - they practically run it together - would give
some young kid in the States an opportunity to appear on the program, even
if they played two minutes of free-bass music. But they wouldn't.
Sometimes I think they're afraid of the changes that are taking place,
afraid these young kids could wipe them off the map musically. And
also they probably feel their audience isn't ready for it. But I
think that if you've got a successful program, you can bomb on it for two
minutes and people aren't going to turn you off. Welk's credibility
has been established for so long. When the accordion has been so
underrated over the years and since it's been so good to both of them,
you would think they'd just extend themselves even a modest inch to give
some kid a break, and they just won't do it. It's really a tragedy. it's
like how they say in women's lib that sometimes your biggest obstacles
are women. I feel the same way in terms of the accordion. The
biggest obstacle we've faced has been accordionists themselves, who've
been absolutely militant in their rejection. In a sense we've been
very fortunate having contemporary music, because we've polarized ourselves
from this part of the accordion community. But it has hurt, because
we don't reach the public that well. As a result, if a kid starts
with accordion, he or she is going to begin on the standard model and then
make that difficult transition, if and when he decides to, to the free-bass.
Some of your students are teaching free-bass accordion
now, however.
That's true. We've taken about ten years to get
to this point. We've got about four hundred students in and around
southern Ontario playing free-bass. I'm just in the process of forming
something called the Classical Accordion Society of Canada [3296 Cindy
Cresc., Mississauga, Ont. L4Y 3J6, Canada]. I know that name
sounds very general and vague, but the word "classical" is supposed to
take care of the separation between the commercial repertoire and what
we're trying to do. It's a misnomer, because nobody really knows
what you mean by classical music, but at the same time I didn't want to
create a title like, say, the Chromatic Free-Bass Accordion Society, because
nobody would know then what you were talking about either. The title
we chose does the job well enough of suggesting that there's a difference
in the kind of music we're interested in. We're trying to encourage
research, commissions, and acceptance by educators, eventually leading
to public awareness.
How would you help someone who doesn't live in Toronto,
but wants to play free-bass accordion?
We would find a way to get a teacher to them. In
some cases it doesn't have to be an accordion teacher. If we could
get a piano teacher interested in free-bass, that person could end up teaching
it. I do have some piano teachers studying with me just to learn
about the accordion. So wherever the interest is with the student,
we can find a way of getting instruction. I've also got very talented
students who come from all over Canada. These kids were interested
enough to travel a little distance to get a lesson. Some of them
are much better than the players you had through the old methods of instruction.
I'm not putting down other accordion teachers; I just believe that nobody
really thought about pursuing new ways of shedding light on repertoire
or teaching methods. They all taught the same stuff, and basically
were content to play the same old way with an accordion orchestra or solo,
doing the same old material. Very few of them extended themselves
to go beyond what every accordion studio was doing.
What new techniques are you imparting to your students?
I'm working with my students on very complex ideas of
breathing. A lot of it is connected with whether you believe that
the secret of playing the accordion is in the bellows. I feel that's
partly true, but I tie the relationship of the bellows to the weight of
the hands. I teach the complete body as part of the production of
sound. Lots of times when you hear a student playing the accordion,
you hear that the instrument is totally strapped in. They just push
in and out. For me, that's like saying that if you drop your rear
end on a piano you're going to get a sound. The mere fact that you
get sound by pushing in and out is not a secret. The question is
how you breathe it. The bellows pressure and the weight of the sound are
tied together. And you have to know that your buttons have to go
down quicker than your right hand, because the reed response varies between
the hands. So weight and pressure and rates at which responses take
place and then are articulated by the bellows stress, are what I teach.
In some German and Czech schools they teach that the secret is only in
the bellows, and they don't relate hand and body motions, with the result
that the sound is somewhat harsh. It comes out a bit sloppy and you
can really tell where the bellows are being changed.
How do people back in Guelph react to the music
you're playing now?
Even my own father still says to me, "What are you doing?"
I play some of these things for him, and he admires what I'm doing, but
unfortunately he just can't understand it. I played at the Guelph
Spring Festival in 1970 and again in '72. 1 played two works - one was
the piece for accordion and string orchestra, with the McGill ensemble,
and I did a thing with the Orford Quartet. Both were very mild selections.
The audience came in droves because I'm a native of Guelph. Everybody
wanted to hear Joey play, but Joey didn't play what they thought he was
going to play. And many of them realized that a gap had set in between
what I was doing and what they thought I was going to do. It came
as a shock; they were all sort of taken aback, but they accepted it because
it was me. Had it not been a local hero sort of thing they probably
would have been swearing about having to pay money to go to such a stupid
concert, but as a result of who I was they accepted it. They said,
"Well, it's different!"
JOSEPH MACEROLLO:
AN ANNOTATED DISCOGRAPHY
Hart House Orchestra (performing Surdin's Concerto
No. 1 for accordion and string orchestra), Radio Canada International
(c/o Canadian Broadcasting Corp., P.O. Box 500, Station A, Toronto, Ontario
M5W lE6, Canada), RCI-238.
lnteraccodinotesta (performing Pentland's Interplay
for accordion and string quartet, with the Purcell String Quartet, Shafer's
La
Testa d'Adriane with soprano Mary Morrison, Krenek's Acco-Music,
and Nordheim's Dinosaurus for accordion and tape), Melbourne (c/o
Waterloo Music Co., 3 Regina St. N., P.O. Box 250, Waterloo, Ontario N2J
4A5, Canada), SMLP 4034.
Joe Macerollo, Free-Bass Accordion (performing Surdin's
Serious I, II, & V, movements from Wuensch's Mini-Suites, Dolin's
Sonata,
and Fiala's Sinfonietta Concertata for accordion, harpsichord, and
string orchestra, with the McGill Chamber Orchestra), Radio Canada International,
RCI-385.
Shafer-Loving/Toi (an audio-visual tone poem for soprano,
three mezzo-sopranos, two or three speakers, dancers, chamber orchestra,
tape, and accordion), Melbourne, SMLP 4035-6.