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The music below is a page of the score for Chaconne, a piece I recorded for Jorge Liderman, http://www.jorgeliderman.com, professor of composition at UC Berkeley. It is written for chimes, vibraphone, accordion, and bass clarinet. Accordion has a certain cachet among classical composers these days; Jorge had originally tried piano instead, but preferred the sustained tone and truer legato that an accordion can achieve.
If you look at the left hand part for the accordion, you’ll realize that it is insane. In fact, I originally got the job on a recommendation from another working accordionist who didn’t want to attempt it. I’ve written in the fingering that I arrived at after some trial and error. Here are a few annotations, corresponding to the four places in the music that I circled:
- At the beginning, I stretched and preset my second, third, and fourth fingers so that I wouldn’t have to jump and possibly land on the wrong note.
- I ended up using my fourth finger to play both the D Major and then the G minor chords. I normally correct this kind of fingering when my students do it, but here I couldn’t come up with any way around it.
- Here I’m pivoting on the D Major button, playing it with my fifth finger and then pivoting to my second, while keeping the button depressed.
- Lastly, there is a stretch from D flat Major to A minor, which is about the biggest stretch that my hand can accommodate.
A couple of performance notes: Although it isn’t marked, Jorge wanted the left hand legato throughout. Also, you’ll note the “p sempre” marked at the top, “always quiet.” That changed as we practiced the piece, and you’ll hear on the recording that the volume definitely goes up and down.
It always happens that the things I prepare for and worry about in a recording session aren’t the things that end up being concerns in the studio, and this recording session was no exception. A couple of times in my playing, my left hand shifted wildly up or down to land on a certain note, to try to make the transition as legato as possible. I had been concerned with landing cleanly on the note, and was able to do so, but on the recording we now heard a slight squeak as my wrist moved against the leather bass strap and the bassboard. It happened some times and it didn’t happen other times. Although I wasn’t a strong enough musician to control it, digital recording came to the rescue, and the sound engineer was able to blend different takes together, and even erase some of the squeaks.
We had another source of squeaks, this time from the pedal of the vibraphone. The vibraphonist was himself a professor of percussion at Berkeley and the instrument was top-notch, but the music was demanding a performance on the edge of the possible. Normally one wouldn’t notice these small squeaks, but the piece is so quiet and haunting that they stood out. Here again, the sound engineer was able to edit out the random squeaks. WD40 also helped.
The final contingency we dealt with was more directly musical. The bass clarinetist has to breathe some times, and I have to change bellows direction. However, the composer would like a smooth legato sound with as few separate phrases as possible. In our own practicing, the clarinetist and I had each come up with phrasings that fit each of our instruments and our own interpretations of the piece, but as we rehearsed together, we needed to come to an agreement on a common interpretation of the phrasing.
The more advanced among you may care to try out these few measures, especially to navigate the left hand issues. Perhaps you’ll find better fingering solutions than I did. For intermediate players, here is a link to a bass chart, which you may need to find some of the chords. For beginning players, my only advice is, safety first: please don’t try this at home.
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