Accordion · 6 min read

The accordion as a concert instrument

Zolotaryov, Gubaidulina and Nordheim gave the accordion a serious repertoire. How free bass, conservatory training and a few composers changed its standing.

2026-08-07

The obstacle was mechanical, not musical

For its first century the accordion could not play serious contrapuntal music, and the reason had nothing to do with taste. The left hand offered preset chords, fixed in voicing and inversion, so you could accompany but not write independent voices. An instrument that cannot state a fugue subject in the bass is not going to acquire a concert repertoire.

Free bass changed that. A converter mechanism lets the left-hand buttons switch from preset chords to a chromatic single-note keyboard spanning several octaves. Suddenly the instrument had two real manuals, sustained tone, and a dynamic range controlled continuously by the bellows. Everything that follows depends on that one piece of engineering.

The second obstacle was institutional. Composers write for instruments played by people they know, and until accordionists were trained in conservatories there was nobody to write for. Russia solved this first, admitting the bayan to higher music education and producing players of conservatory standard who then went looking for repertoire.

Zolotaryov

Vladislav Zolotaryov, born in 1942 and dead by his own hand in 1975 at thirty-three, wrote the works that proved the case. The Partita, the Chamber Suite, the Spanish Rhapsody and the six Children's Suites, which despite the title are real music and are played by adults constantly.

What Zolotaryov did was treat the bayan as a full instrument with its own idiom rather than a keyboard substitute. Dense chromatic writing, extreme registers, bellows articulation as a structural device, and a harmonic language owing something to Shostakovich and something to Russian folk modality. Friedrich Lips, who knew him and premiered much of the work, has spent a career keeping it in circulation.

He wrote for an instrument with almost no concert tradition and produced a body of work that is now unavoidable in any advanced accordion programme. That is a strange achievement for a short life.

Gubaidulina and the wider world

Sofia Gubaidulina wrote De Profundis for solo bayan in 1978, and it remains the piece most often named when someone asks whether the accordion has serious music. It is built around the bellows: breath, pressure, clusters that swell from nothing, the instrument treated as something that inhales. She returned to it with Et exspecto, Silenzio for bayan, violin and cello, Fachwerk for bayan and orchestra, and Under the Sign of Scorpio.

Her interest matters because she was not an accordion specialist writing for her own instrument. She was a major composer who found something in it that she could not get elsewhere, which is how an instrument stops being a curiosity.

In Norway, Arne Nordheim wrote Dinosaurus for accordion and tape and Flashing for solo accordion, both closely associated with the player Mogens Ellegaard, whose advocacy in Denmark did for Scandinavia what Lips did for Russia. Add Magnus Lindberg, Luciano Berio's Sequenza XIII for accordion, Torbjörn Lundquist and Jukka Tiensuu, and the literature is substantial.

Transcriptions and the argument about them

A large part of what accordionists perform is transcribed: Bach, Scarlatti, Rameau, Franck, Mussorgsky. Purists object, and the objection is weaker than it looks. Baroque keyboard music was routinely moved between harpsichord, organ and clavichord, and the accordion's sustained reeds and terraced registration sit closer to an organ than a piano does.

What the accordion adds is dynamic control on a held note, which no organ or harpsichord has. A fugue subject can be shaped as it sounds. What it lacks is the attack and decay of a struck string, so Classical and Romantic piano repertoire mostly does not transfer, and sensible players leave it alone.

The honest position is that transcription built the audience and the original repertoire justified it. Both remain in programmes.

Where it stands now

Accordion is a conservatory subject across Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France and increasingly East Asia, with competitions like the Coupe Mondiale and Klingenthal setting a technical standard that is frankly ferocious. New works appear every season, and accordionists turn up in contemporary ensembles as a matter of course rather than as a novelty booking.

The gap is the general audience, which still associates the instrument with dance music and has not heard De Profundis. That is a programming problem rather than a repertoire problem. It is also why we keep a large free score library at A&G Academy: the concert literature is much easier to love once you can actually get hold of it.

Frequently asked

Is the accordion used in classical music?

Yes. It has an original concert repertoire built mainly since the 1960s, including Zolotaryov's Partita, Gubaidulina's De Profundis and Fachwerk, Nordheim's Flashing and Berio's Sequenza XIII. It is taught in conservatories across Russia, Scandinavia, Germany and France, and appears regularly in contemporary music ensembles.

What is the most important classical piece for accordion?

Sofia Gubaidulina's De Profundis, written for solo bayan in 1978, is the work most often cited. It treats the bellows as breath, building textures that swell from silence in a way no other keyboard instrument can produce. Zolotaryov's Partita is the other piece that established the instrument's seriousness.

Why do accordionists play Bach?

Because it works. The accordion sustains notes indefinitely like an organ, has terraced registration through its register switches, and adds something no organ has: continuous dynamic control on a held note through bellows pressure. Free bass makes independent left-hand voices possible, so fugues can be played as written.


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