The accordion is concert hall ready

Unless it has been removed, one of my favourite Gary Larson cartoons from “The Far Side” can be discovered at the back of a glass display case in Edinburgh’s Reid Museum of Musical Instruments.

In its upper panel, St. Peter can be seen at the Pearly Gates, greeting a newcomer with the words, “Welcome to heaven. Here is your harp.” In its lower panel, the devil is greeting a newcomer with the words, “Welcome to hell. Here is your accordion.”

Yes, like the comic Rodney Dangerfield, the accordion “don’t get no respect” in some classical music circles. In fact, in his notorious “Devil’s Dictionary,” the American journalist Ambrose Bierce goes so far as to define it as “an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.”

Not that the accordion is completely without friends, among them the Canadian composer Frank Horvat, who has featured the instrument along with a couple of dozen others in an extraordinary new compact disc album on the Centrediscs label titled “Music for Self-Isolation.”

And if this title seems strange, consider the times we are living through. As Horvat explains in his album notes: “As many of us around the world settled into the shock of a new self-isolation reality, I was feeling helpless at home during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then I realized I could at least provide my musical friends with new compositions while they were spending time in lockdown. So in the spring of 2020 I composed 31 short pieces of music for unaccompanied solo instrument or voice or a duo of musicians self-isolating together.”

The compositions are indeed very short and not at all complicated. As a genre-crossing musician and explorer of social issues, Horvat practises accessibility throughout his album.

He is also something of an instrumental democrat, writing solos for the predictable piano, violin and guitar but also for the less predictable double bass, tuba and trombone, in the latter case bringing to mind my favourite definition of a gentleman as someone who can play the trombone but doesn’t.

On this album, the trombone is played not by a gentleman but by a woman, Vanessa Fralick of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and here too Horvat is a democrat, splitting the assignments about equally between the sexes.

His accordionist, however, is not only male but one of Canada’s most prominent champions of the instrument, Joseph Petric, who has turned his COVID-19 self-isolation into a productive year and a half, commissioning a dozen and a half new works and working on three new compact discs, as well as preparing a set of essays for publication.

“I was surprised to hear about the album from Frank Horvat,” Petric recalls. “I didn’t know him. We each recorded our music individually, even the final ensemble piece, which Frank and his wife mixed in their home studio.

“We were lucky to be able to record during a three-day period in January between lockdowns, but it was a strange experience to take turns standing alone on the stage of Roy Thomson Hall with nobody out there listening.”

Like his fellow musicians, Petric misses live performing, but sees an upside to the pandemic in that “you begin to think about what is really authentic to you as an individual.”

As a accordionist, he has also had time to reflect on changing attitudes toward his instrument:

“It doesn’t happen often now, but I still have colleagues who say cruel things. The best thing to do then is just get onstage with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and premiere a concerto.”

Petric has done just that. Like his distinguished colleague Joseph Macerollo, he has taken an instrument often dismissed by classical musicians as fit for polkas and brought it proudly to the stage of our major concert halls.

Not that the jokes are likely to disappear.

Oboists are still routinely accused of consorting with “an ill wind that nobody blows good,” and it is still claimed that when a violist in an orchestra dies he or she is simply moved back one stand. Musicians like to poke each other in the ribs.

But it is surely appropriate to be reminded by an album such as “Music for Self-Isolation” of the egalitarianism imposed by our current condition.

As Horvat suggests, “with video performances being shared from the homes of musicians around the world on social media, I envisioned them onstage in an acoustically glorious concert hall. In January 2021 that became a reality when 25 musicians took to the empty stage at Roy Thomson Hall to record this album.

“The project is my attempt to raise the spirits of fellow musicians and the community at large, as we traverse through uncertain times. We might be self-isolating but we are never alone … we have music.”