Solo: accordion - A Breathing House

Ensemble: concert accordion

Duration: 18 minutes

Commissioned by: Goran Stevanovich

Published by: Yes Daedalus Music

Note:

A Breathing House takes its name from a term coined by the poet Rose Ausländer: “atemhaus,” or “house of breath.” Although Ausländer’s term referred to the breath that exists within our own bodies, the same term was later used by the writer Tom R. Schulz to describe the accordion, an instrument that is constantly shapeshifting, alive with the air it breathes.

In planning this piece for accordionist Goran Stevanovich, I decided to take this concept literally—to write a musical suite based on the many rooms of a house. I asked Goran for some memories of his childhood home in Bosnia and was struck by the moving juxtapositions: watching cartoons on the same TV where his family would anxiously receive war reports; a comfy couch used to block the front door; a child’s logical mixup of the “living room” as the “leaving room” when his father went off to war. To fill out the house, I also brought a few memories of my own childhood: the bright warmth of my mother’s garden, a tangled forest path, our dusty attic with its boxes of fading photographs.

Like the accordion, a home is always in transition, shaped by the breathing entities that live and leave its walls. But there’s something permanent as well— it is a place that we carry with us as we travel through life, changing as we change. I hope this suite conjures something of that contradiction: the loving bickering of a family around a dinner table; the domestic order of a garden giving way to the mysterious dark of the woods; the comfort and sadness of a place we will always have, but to which we can never fully return.