[From the Letter to the Editor section of the Winter
1978 Accordion Arts Magazine]
(Mr. Bisilia prefaces the following Open Letter in
which he speaks out against recent decisions
by major accordion organizations to limit the use
of transcribed literature in competition, by writing: "As a professional
accordionist, I have played behind many great performers such as Juliet
Prowse (in Irma La Douce), Bobby Vinton, Mickey Rooney, Kathryn Grayson,
and many more too numerous to mention. My students are playing professionally
for the same type people all over the United States. During World
War 11, I was one of the main staff of arrangers for the Eighth Service
Command Band. It was aired weekly from coast to coast. In lieu of this,
I feet my views are well taken.)
An Open Letter: The Accordion Boycott
By Mickey Bisilia
In a very recent annual musician's union gathering, which
was comprised of over a thousand members, 40% or more being keyboard performers,
I was asked about the progress of the accordion. Having taught most
of these people through the years (over forty years to be exact) they were
very cognizant of the great advancement the accordion has made in just
the last ten years. One of my protégés, Joseph Natoli,
had performed for them at times, and the piano men especially, were amazed
at his renditions of Chopin, Ravel, Prokofieff, to name a few, and some
of his own original avant-garde compositions.
One truly great piano artist, Mr. James Tavolario, a Chopin
authority, who has performed at Carnegie Hall, marveled at Natoli's rendition
of the Chopin Sonata in B Minor. He just couldn't believe
his ears, as he put it. Now I know that this sort of exposure is
going on throughout these United States. I am continually being sought
out for accordion transcriptions and arrangements of the great masters.
I've spent a lifetime at it, with great results, as most accordion people
know.
Now comes the crux of this whole situation: When
I informed this keyboard gathering, the transcriptions of Chopin, Mozart,
Beethoven, or performance of violin or piano concerti was now forbidden
in top accordion competitions, I really opened up a can of worms, so to
speak. The reaction was very heartwarming to me, as they deemed the
current rulings as, destructive, discriminatory, prejudiced, preposterous,
and a complete demagoguery. I also have a few names of my own that
I don't care to mention. So enough of that.
I would rather like to express my own opinion, as I feel
that I've been silent for too long. I have spent many years developing
young artists on this exact restricted material. I don't care to
prognosticate, but I find this to be a detrimental blow to the future of
the accordion. Anyone with any real imagination must, out of necessity,
because of lack of truly great accordion literature, instinctively search
out a curriculum of his own.
This pressure dictation of, don't play this, don't play
that, is and has been conducive to, why play the accordion at all?
The accordion (and believe me, I'm telling it as it is), is being played
less and less, because those of us that work so diligently to produce these
young artists of today, are being restricted more and more. We have
instruments today that are fully meeting the requirements of the artist,
and in the right hands, with the right kind of transcribing and adaption,
these people are fully capable of playing the great works of the great
masters. I've proven this over and over again to the delight of symphony
conductors, pianists, and violinists of exceedingly high degree.
But now, all of a sudden, this has all become sacrilegious, and must be
put to rest! What absurdity!
The accordion is still in its infancy. It needs
every kind of exploitation and exposure it can get. It has to be
played and seen, in a completely unrestricted virtuoso manner. All
controversy should be resolved on the battlefield, so to speak. There
are a few, far too few, original works published at this time through grants
and commissions, by great organizations as the AAA., ATG., etc., but not
enough at this writing to significantly allow the educator and performing
artist to dismiss all transcriptions of truly great merit.
I, for one, am certainly not embarking on that dead-end
route. When the time comes that we have an over-abundance of accordion
literature, I mean top-shelf material (and I can't see that happening for
many years to come), I will resort out of necessity and good taste to a
certain amount of piano, or violin, or whatever I feel is result-producing
material.
I feel that the new rules, which are a definite boycott,
are crushing an already somewhat failing industry.
The problem is that there are a certain amount of what
I call "no-doers" in authoritative positions that are setting the accordion
up on a monumental basis, and the only monument they're capable of producing
is one to a dying instrument.
I feel that the top educators and performers should have
a voice in all this restriction. After all, they are the real back-bone
of the industry. We need freedom, not boycotts and the accordion
will flourish. Forget the boycotts and remember it's not what you
play, it's how you play that really counts.
Mickey Bisilia Youngstown, Ohio
OTHER PERSPECTIVES:
By Joe Natoli 12/1/98
At some point in time during the 1970s, an acceptable "fad" had developed,
mostly honored in the Coupe Mondiale competitions that performing anything
on the accordion other than completely original literature and/or Bach
transcriptions was nothing short of sacrilegious. This paradigm seemed
to emanate from the success the Russians were achieving in the competitions
at that time with their own powerful Bach transcriptions, due mainly to
the outstanding reeds and special switching mechanisms indigenous to their
free bass instruments. In fact, this discriminatory attitude against
any non-Baroque transcriptions whatsoever on the accordion became so overt,
that when I played a Chopin transcription in the 1972 Coupe Mondiale competition,
one of the competitors literally said to me in his broken English accent,
"Why do you choose to play Romantic literature on the accordion instead
of Bach?" Then he proceeded to look at me as if I had three eyes
when I gave him my perspective that the piece worked quite well on chromatic
free-bass accordion and that any transcription can be considered valid
if it meets that criteria. [As an aside, that same performer today
is performing Liszt, and other Romantic literature transcriptions on his
instrument, so possibly he had a religious experience that changed his
mind.]
At any rate, it is wonderful to see that things seemed
to have changed for the better in the accordion world since Mr. Bisilia's
impassioned "speech" above in his letter to the editor in 1978. Accordionists,
teachers, and educators globally seem to have come back to their senses
and realized that it is not wrong or sacrilegious to play transcriptions
on our instrument, and in fact in the right performer's hands can be a
glorious musical achievement.
Incidentally, accordionists were not the first musicians
to render transcriptions for instrumental combinations other than those
intended by the original composition. In fact, Bach himself often
did arrangements and re-arrangements of his own works and the works of
other composers (like Vivaldi) for many different musical settings, sometimes
re-executing the same composition for harpsichord, then two violins, then
string orchestra, then for four harpsichords and string orchestra!
Franz Liszt and Serge Rachmonioff are two other fabulous composers and
titans of the piano who often chose to transcribe works for their instrument
from orchestral and other settings. And who can forget the
orchestral transcription of Moussourgsky's
Pictures At An Exhibition
by Ravel or the beautiful orchestral renderings of Bach's Wachet Auf
and
other Baroque pieces by the great Leopold Stokowski? In more recent
history, the late Glenn Gould was a strong advocate of transcriptions for
his instrument, and I couldn't have given a better endorsement myself for
his sensitivity and musicianship than in the following extract from an
internet thread in the "rec.music.makers.squeezebox" newsgroup dated 11/28/98:
Subject: SML: Classical
accordion?
Date: 28 Nov 1998 05:41:21
GMT
From: gateway@d-and-d.com
Reply-To: "Dan Lavry" <danlavry@halcyon.com>
Organization: NorthWest Nexus
Inc.
To: squeezebox@hockeytape.com
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.squeezebox
To the classical music lovers:
Most Saturdays, I go to hear the
Seattle Symphony (the new concert hall is great). Last week they played
Beethoven's Symphony #6 (Pastoral). My wife and a couple of friends
commented about the wonderful orchestration. Perhaps not a piece of music
for the accordion? or the Piano? Don't be so sure of it. I have a CD (Sony
Classical SMK 52637) played by the great Glenn Gould: Beethoven piano transcriptions
of the Pastoral Symphony, with the transcriptions done by no less than
Franz Liszt. This is an amazing, fantastic, and wonderful performance.
It is "absolute proof" that when the music is great and multi-dimensional,
a serious "heavy duty" musician can alter it, keep the essence, and come
up with something great.
In my opinion, Gould realized that
one of the dimensions (the interwoven timbres of strings, wind, percussion...)
is not "available" on the piano. He decided to slow the performance
by about 30% and added a lot of drama and emotions.
What an inspiration. I am going
to be less "self conscious" when playing classical music on the accordion!!!
Best Regards
Dan Lavry
The interesting issue with this quote from Dan Lavry is that
he is classical pianist and also the son of the Marc Lavry, the well known
Israeli composer, and yet he still happens to enjoy the accordion...a rare
breed of musician indeed! Those who have been close to the accordion
have been all too painfully aware over the years that pianists in general
(especially those of university breeding) were especially "snooty" about
the capabilities of the accordion and whether or not it deserved a place
with other instruments in the "legitimate" instrumental kingdom.
Mr. Lavry has the unique perspective of performing and knowing the literature
of both instruments and makes a rather poignant observation that seems
to be in total agreement with Mickey Bisilia's letter to the editor above
- that is, in the hands of the right performer any instrument and
any
piece of music is valid and deserves to be heard.
But make no mistake that the musical discrimination against
the accordion since the 1960s is really no different at all from the various
forms of racial discrimination that have occurred in the US and other parts
of the world. One thing that all victims of racial discrimination
realize is that until they start to love and respect themselves, no one
else will either. It appears that accordionists have finally come
out of the dark ages of the 1970s and realized that it is OK to perform
transcriptions and to be proud of the accordion, its heritage, and its
place in musical society. It is no coincidence then that the accordion
and its performers are slowly re-emerging in musical society as respected
musical entities, now that we have removed those artificial barriers of
what should and should not be performed on our extremely versatile instrument!
