ACCORDIONS GONE WILD!
Getting Creative With Your Music
This workshop was prepared in July 2007 for the monthly meeting of the Washington Metropolitan Accordion Society (www.washingtonaccordions.org). Hints, assertions, comments and condemnations contained in this workshop are solely the opinions of the misguided author and are intended only to “get your juices flowing”. The workshop is intended to stimulate the creativity of accordion players by suggesting concepts and ideas rather that defining techniques in detail. After all, if you are shown what to do, you aren't really being “creative”.
Most of us became accordion players by strict adherence to a framework of music that we were taught. We learned to play somebody else's arrangement of music, usually with wondrous precision and we graduated through increasingly more difficult compositions. Some of us learned to improvise somewhat around the framework and that represents our “creativity”. While that is commendable and often very entertaining, this workshop challenges you to get away from those frameworks and become your own arranger. Be a rebel!
This workshop, while not exhaustive, will range across five areas of concentration and will explore them in various levels of detail with occasional examples (presented as brief video clips). Your job, after the workshop, will be to come up with other areas of concentration, better levels of detail, and hopefully, your own creative examples. We will address:
Using the Accordion's Capabilities
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