Doctoral dissertation “Gnarly Buttons: Composer-Performer Collaboration in Contemporary Accordion Music”, published in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts at the Faculty of Music of University of Toronto, is now available on ProQuest. Here’s and abstract of the research and the link to the dissertation can be found below.
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Collaboration between composers and performers is a common practice in contemporary classical music, a genre in which the accordion is becoming increasingly popular. Collaboration between accordionists and composers is particularly significant because of relative novelty of the instrument; composers often lack general knowledge about the accordion, with limited reference material available. Furthermore, the classical accordion remains largely unstandardized.
The accordion offers a unique opportunity to explore various collaborative processes. Due to of the lack of pre-existing knowledge, composers have the opportunity to approach the collaborative situation with an open mind, encouraging curiosity and exploration. In this context, the accordionists’ influence in the collaborative process can become more pronounced, potentially increasing the performer’s impact on the resulting music.
This dissertation explores collaboration between composers and accordionists from two perspectives: through instrument-specific characteristics that distinguish the accordion from other instruments and within the context of contemporary research regarding collaboration and creativity. Many researchers define creativity as inherently collaborative. Composers’ creative work is continuously informed by a socio-cultural web of influences, including people, institutions, and markets. Performers can influence the creative process in various ways to different extents, and recent musicological research has identified methods to dissect and categorize collaborative processes. This dissertation provides an overview of recent academic literature concerning both collaborative creativity and collaborations between composers and performers.
As my original contribution, I conducted interviews with multiple composers and accordionists to collect their experiences working together and to study them in the framework provided in the literature. The interviews reveal how collaborative partnerships can develop, how artists collaborate in practice, and what collaborative roles artists can assume. They also provide information about accordion, highlighting its interesting features and challenges for both composers and accordionists. My research found that interviewed artists consider collaboration crucial for the creative process and appreciate open-minded collaborators willing to engage. My dissertation concludes that collaborative processes are always unique and vary based on the collaborative artists and the projects, encouraging further exploration of collaborative creativity in artistic practice and as a topic of research.
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Matti Pulkki 