Top 5 Robert Davine Quotes

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Robert Davine (born Aubrey Robert Davine, 5 April 1924 - 25 November 2001) was an American concert accordionist and Professor of Accordion and Music Theory at the University of Denver's Lamont School of Music for over three decades. He has been cited as one of the first founders of a collegiate academic program in advanced accordion studies within the United States. His performances with international orchestras and chamber ensembles helped to foster the acceptance of the accordion as a legitimate orchestral instrument on the concert hall stage.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Since the accordion has so many attributes that are conducive to chamber music, it is particularly suitable for this medium of expression. In essence, the accordion has all of the prerequisites essential to small ensemble involvement: sustaining power, dynamic sensitivity, articulated response, timbre, and texture variance, and compatibility of sound with string and wind instruments.

There are instruments known as free-bass instruments, or sometimes called the bassetti, where you have totally complete single pitches, simply like you would in the right hand, and you form your own chords. And you have a greater range in the left hand, some three to four-and-a-half octaves.

The buttons on the standard instrument are a combination of single bass notes and sets of chords - major, minor, dominant seventh, and diminished...Yes (in all keys). And you can form other chords using more than one button; you don't have to just stay with one button. So you can play the root of the chord, with a single bass note, and then the chord coupled with that. So you get a considerable amount of sonority that way.

The difficulties, of course, if you take an orchestral work you want to try to get as much of that composition, harmonically, and contrapuntally, that you possibly can. Many times that's impossible. It depends upon the texture of the music. And there are certain solo things that simply do not lend themselves to the accordion, such as Chopin. The ballads would be next to impossible to really do successfully...The accordion is allied to organ-texture, for instance, a Bach Prelude.

The accordion fun? ....Sometimes. Not all the time. I find that it can be a frustrating instrument. The coordination involved is extraordinary and sometimes that coordination doesn't happen.... The use of the left hand and at the same time getting the dynamic range, the volume, is quite difficult. Other times it is fun if you're working with other musicians and you're doin' pieces that you really enjoy. It can really be fun!