Michael Bridge: Transcript
Leah Roseman:
(Music) Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leia Roseman, a weekly podcast with in-depth conversations featuring a fascinating variety of guests worldwide. Michael Bridge is an accordion virtuoso who performs in many styles on both concert accordion and digital accordion. In this wide ranging conversation, Michael spoke to me about how best to engage with audiences, the subtleties intrinsic to programming digital accordion sounds, and how to forge lasting relationships. Michael was awarded his doctorate of musical arts from University of Toronto and is a prize-winning soloist and chamber musician who tours worldwide. This is also an episode which features a lot of great music, including many novel sounds you won't have heard before from an accordion and also with the groups Bridge and Wolak and the Ladom ensemble. Finally, before we get into the episode, I'm an independent podcaster, and although it's truly a labor of love to produce this series, I have many costs which need to be covered, and every dollar helps. My Ko-fi page is linked in the description. You can listen to this wherever you get your podcasts, watch the video on my YouTube, read the transcript, and use the timestamps to navigate the episode as needed.
Hi Michael, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Michael Bridge:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
There's so many interesting things to talk about, the accordion and your life and music, and when I was researching your life in music, I noticed there were certain really key turning points, and we'll circle back to maybe some of the earlier ones, but I thought it might be interesting for my listeners to start with the digital accordion and when that entered your life and you embraced it.
Michael Bridge:
That's a great starting point because there's a good dissonance there in that when I first encountered digital accordion, I didn't like it at all, first of all, and I was somewhat vocal, at least among my close friends and acquaintances that I would never play such a device. Of course, that was, let me think, maybe 2008 or nine when that happened, and by 2011, which is the first time that I won the competition that Roland was then hosting in Canada and in many other countries too, where if you won the competition, you got to keep the accordion was basically what it was. And leading up to that, they sent you one in the mail and you had to figure out something interesting to do with it, and then winner keeps it, losers have to give it back, so to speak. So I was motivated by then because they literally put it into my hands and I had a little bit more time to experiment and to mainly discover that the sounds, how it sounds when you take it out of the box is very minimal compared to what you can actually do with it and all of the fun and the artistry is in the link between the programming and the performer and how customized you make the instrument for you.
So I guess I had to admit that I was wrong or something like that, and was then able to dig into the wide world of programming and figuring all of this out.
Leah Roseman:
So most of the point of a digital accordion is that it can sound like anything else.
Michael Bridge:
Yes, in fact, I think the best way to use it is to sound like not an accordion, because if you want an acoustic accordion sound, play an acoustic accordion.
And when I play with larger ensembles, like if I solo with an orchestra for instance, I never use digital accordion because we already have an incredible richness of other instruments. I couldn't add more to that. So it makes more sense to have the more precise acoustic accordion sound because yes, you can still control one sound more precisely on the acoustic instrument than possibly you will ever be able to do on a digital one. But when you're on your own or when I'm touring extensively for a long time with my duo, it makes sense to bring, I say the power of the digital accordion to be able to make all that sound, all that bass to shake the floors, which really creates an impact on people. So that's kind of how I make the choice between the two.
Leah Roseman:
I thought it would be really nice towards the beginning of this episode to share one of Michael's performances with his duo Bridge and Wolak in this arrangement of Sidney Bechet's. Petite Fleur. Michael is playing digital accordion and Kornel is playing clarinet. (music)
When I watched your videos, you did these extensive demo videos showing your programs and people can buy your programs, and it interested me that you'd had over 10,000 views on these and they hadn't been up that long. So there's a lot of people out there seeking this information.
Michael Bridge:
And one thing that I discovered by going into the YouTube analytics fairly recently is actually the average playtime on those videos per watch. I think it's something like 40% of people watched the whole thing and they're like 10, 15 minutes, some of them. And I was first of all honored and all of that. But yeah, there is interest and now I have not sold 10,000 sets of these sounds, nowhere even near. So I think sometimes it's people going back and trying to learn from them
And doing a deep dive into this experimentation. But the whole point of these sounds that I've created and that people now can put in their digital accordion is that they can edit them too. It's all open source. It's, I've tried to give people a step up in terms of the programming because there's a big learning curve and it's important to be able to sometimes just get to the music and not always be blocked from, I just want to play, I just want to make a decent sound. But it's surprising how much thought has to go into, "I just want to" anything. In fact, I have a personal hangup, any sentence that contains the word "just" I don't like somebody "Can you just do..."that generally means they don't understand what they're asking for. My personal pet peeve.
Leah Roseman:
Well, a couple of the programming, I don't know, what do you call them? The sounds
Michael Bridge:
Technically called user programs, but I often just call them sound sets or something like that. But user programs, if we're to be precise.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, A couple of the user programs in those demos that I intrigue me, one was the, let's see. Oh yeah, the rotary organ with swing band, because you have the drums in there, you have the bass, you have the rotary organ.
Michael Bridge:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And also you had developed these sound sets based on your inspiration from the Voyager Spacecrafts very unique kind of sounds,
Michael Bridge:
I'm a huge Star Trek fan, and this was also, I did a lot of that programming during the background of the pandemic. Touring was interrupted, I was at home instead of gone half the year trying to figure out what to do other than listen to my hair grow and basically trying to think about what's the state of the world. And I don't know about you, but during the pandemic, at least for me as a musician, there was a sense of solidarity of human connection. And I noticed near my building, there was another apartment building. Do you remember at 5:00 PM No. At sundown people would bang on pots and pans outside. There'd be a huge cacophony resonating across these apartment buildings. And it was beautiful and magical and I kind of miss some of those elements of that difficult time. But I was also reading Carl Sagan quotes and thinking about space and probably watching a lot of Star Trek, hence the thought about, well, we're all in this together. It's the first event since maybe World War II that united the whole planet really and affected everybody. And that's something to be behold as well. And to then think about that pale blue dot on which we all live was what took me in that direction.
Leah Roseman:
Here's an excerpt from one of Michael's demo videos for his digital accordion user programs. And the full video is linked in the show notes.
Michael Bridge:
Voyager number one and Voyager two. Of course, these are inspired by the spacecraft Voyager one and two, which both took off from Earth in the seventies. It's real life Star Trek and they are the furthest objects. Voyager One is now the furthest object ever to leave Earth. It's exited our solar system. A few years ago, passed Pluto's orbit (music) actually quite a while ago I think, but I was inspired by that idea and made sounds for each of those spacecraft on their little, they're like the little engine. That chord could just chuffing away through space. And the way that I design that into the sound is by putting this chord that I'm just holding the chord and it keeps cycling through different harmonic filters on the chord.
So if you play in time with that, it sounds really good. Again, bellow swells. Go for it. Voyager two Interstellar. This is inspired directly by the movie. There's a version of this in my freebase user program bank as well. Honestly, that one's better because then you can do a bass and then a (singing) rolling the chord, which you can't do here. You just get the same chord three different times and that just really brings it to life. But I wanted to make a stradella version as well. There's also an accordion version just in case you feel the need to play big inter interstellar sounds.
Leah Roseman:
I'm very ignorant about accordions and I noticed one of the techniques was using your chin to push buttons, which surprised me, but it makes sense actually. Your hands are so busy,
Michael Bridge:
It's the one limb still available quasi limb because both of your hands are occupied and your legs are supporting and actually controlling the instrument. We draw quite a bit on cello for inspiration, whereas a lot of the instrument on cello is moved and controlled at least with the legs so that the arms are free to play. Same on accordion. So we have to change a lot of registers and organists have little buttons below the keyboards for the thumbs. They have all sorts of foot pedals, but they thought, Hey, accordion, what can we do? Let's make them use the chin. Boom. It's not a nervous tick.
Leah Roseman:
And when you largely perform standing up or sitting down,
Michael Bridge:
Depends on which accordion.-
Acoustic is always seated. 35 pounds digital can be standing because it's 25 pounds, but you have better control seated. There's no two ways about it.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need my listeners' help. Please consider buying me a coffee. The link to my Ko-fi page is in the description. Every dollar helps me cover the costs of this huge project. Thanks so much.
Now, it's unusual that you studied with one master teacher for all your university degrees through the end of your doctorate. Yes. And in fact, you wrote your thesis about Joseph Macerollo. Well, maybe you can explain about expressive virtuosity on accordion and different mentors.
Michael Bridge:
Absolutely. It's unusual, but it was the kind of only option because only University of Toronto in North America when I started my undergrad offered degrees in accordion. A second program has now started at University of Victoria, and there are zero in the U S A at present, unfortunately, we're trying to change that, but there was only the one at the time. And then by the time I wanted to do D M A doctoral studies, Victoria happened by then, but there was still only this one for doctoral studies. And so in terms, but I should say in terms of changing a teacher or something, which is something a lot of people think is generally a good idea, the reason very much why I wanted to do masters at U of T still was because I felt I hadn't learned everything that Joe had to offer at that stage and that we had just gotten started is how it felt. And then in terms of my D M A studies, that was still, I mean, there's always more you can learn from a teacher, and that was still part of the reason, but very much the topic that I wanted to cover was then to codify all of these insanely precise motions that he has made and discovered or maybe started using. I don't know if the word discovered is the right way to say it, because other people do some of these things too, but they're often not aware.
And the whole point of that thesis was to make explicit and written in the painstaking detail some of the things that are very hard to understand oneself is doing.
And though, to your point about it seems like a lot with one teacher, I did interview two others, two European professors who are I think also masters of using their body to control the sound and tone. And we did somewhat of a comparison, not too much comparison, but more just all their techniques together. There are so many ways of using the body. I just wanted to have a repository of excellent ideas, and that was the main motivation behind that thesis. I think we can get to comparing and throwing things out later generations after me will do that. But accordion is a much younger instrument than say violin, where we wrote the books 200 years ago plus. And there have not been major changes to the design of violin for several centuries, only little things, whereas accordion is still changing. It's only maybe become somewhat standardized since about the 19, late eighties or nineties, but we're still trying to standardize right now actually.
Leah Roseman:
But it's so popular across the globe in so many different styles.
Michael Bridge:
Yeah, that's one of the things that is most interesting is how quickly it spread
Since invention in 1829, it's become an icon of folk culture in many, many countries. From China to Brazil to Lesotho, to Argentina, all over the place. And yeah, there are some very interesting theories why it did spread so quickly, but it has, and however, that is under many, many different guises of folk music local to each country. And it's only recently my role or my attempt is to help it gain more recognition in its identity as a concert instrument, as a classical instrument, contemporary chamber, orchestral soloist, and all of that aesthetic where it is approached with the same level of mental precision as any other classical soloist, world leading classical soloist. Not to say that there isn't a great deal of skill and precision required to play as a great folk musician as well. The aesthetic approach to concerts of some types of music is more focused than some others. So I like to say that I play concert music, which means to me any genre, mainly classical, but other genres too, where the arrangement and the presentation is done in such a way that it is hopefully worthy of being listened to with focused attention. Like in a quiet concert hall, beautiful acoustics, any piece you play there, to me, I would call concert music. And that's my genre, if you will.
Whereas something that is designed to be played outside at a folk festival or at a club is a different type of presentation, and others are doing that spectacularly well.
Leah Roseman:
And there's a tradition of using accordion for some dance music like polkas and
Michael Bridge:
Oh my goodness, yes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Michael Bridge:
And half of my life before studying more classical music was primarily linked to that on accordion until I was about 16. I'd never really played classical accordion. And that even continued into, in some way, it took until I was maybe 21 or 22 to completely fade out from my activities that I was promoting and doing, because it is a great deal of fun to do that. And a very valid use, obviously of the accordion. That's how most people use it in North America and the community around that and the folk music festivals, whether in Texas or Alberta or here in Ontario, it's incredible, the following and the love and the nostalgia that many people, particularly immigrant populations recalling old country back in Europe that they have towards these accordion sounds that when it plays a song that they recognize, it's very powerful. People really crave that and it gets to them on a deep level.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were a pretty young teenager, you were going into retirement residences and playing for people, a lot of concerts, and I'm guessing you might've felt a certain sense of isolation in terms of your peers because of your interest being different?
Michael Bridge:
That's a fair question, and yes, I was, but I didn't really feel, it didn't feel like isolation. I was lucky enough to have a really strong community through the accordion festivals. I grew up in Calgary and there are lots of festivals around there. So every summer it was Chaker block, totally full of festivals, and we would just go from one to the next and I would see people that I knew, yes, many had gray hair, but it didn't seem, I guess I started being around adults and seniors young enough that I never really thought about that. And I was also very lucky. I think that at my school, I mean the accordion kid, I am sure that in an alternate reality, I could have been heavily bullied for that one,
Particularly if I had grown up maybe 20 years sooner when accordion was considered quite unpopular in say the seventies or eighties. But I was in the nineties and the two thousands, and kids growing up then are kind of a blank slate towards accordion. They just thought and continue to think, oh, cool, what does that do? No preconceptions, no issues with it in the background of their knowledge about the instrument. So I never really faced any negative comments or anything like that. And it was only later that people said, did you? And I was like, should I have, I also went to a very small school, so there weren't that many kids to know. It wasn't like I could be part of a graduating class of hundreds. Maybe that had a role to do with it as well. But yeah, I think I was lucky.
Leah Roseman:
I'm very glad to hear that. That's great. So you did have this turning point when you were 15,
Michael Bridge:
I guess it was when I went in 2007 to the AL competition, the accordion World Cup, which that year was in Washington DC. It was the closest it had been. And my family saw that and my parents said, let's go see what's going on. And anyways, I got to watch all of the competitions going on at the world level and saw that most people were playing buttons on the right hand side, and actually more importantly, they were playing something called free-bass on the left hand side where although the buttons look the same, there's a converter switch and then the buttons become individual notes rather than preset chords. So that basically means that your instrument then is comparable to a two manual organ. Both hands have full range and full capacity. That opens up the wide world of playing baroque music, contemporary classical concert arrangements of folk music.
Leah Roseman:
When you went to the World Accordion Championship and you were exposed to free-bass, this opened up your mind to what was possible on the accordion.
Michael Bridge:
Yeah, so Stradella bass or normal bass versus free-bass, I can show you here.
So on stradella, I have one octave worth of notes (music), but you'll hear if I keep going, it just loops back and does the same notes again (music). You can't get that high E that you so desperately want, and then you have preset chords(music). But if I push this magic mechanism converter, then those preset chords (music) become individual notes (music). So you have about four and a half octaves there of range, and again, you can play (music) that scale (music) and go as high as you want. So it's now basically a two manual organ. And if you want to play like a keyboard work by Bach, (music)
Leah Roseman:
That was great. Yeah. Bach in your hands, it sounds amazing on the accordion.
Michael Bridge:
Thank you. And you can see right away, I mean the hands are equals and there's nothing better than baroque music to demonstrate that. So then the accordion truly is free. You can do any manner of exciting music. I could even play just a tiny bit of that Gubaidulina if you would like. And then maybe we can fade to a better recording. It starts out with this wondrous clusters way up high (music), and then the sound of wind,(sounds) and then we layer some beautiful harmonies on the left hand under those clusters (music), et cetera. It goes on for a while, and that's actually the first piece that featured a quintuplet bellow shake where there's a way of open, close, hit the back, hit the top open again, where you get a five attack kind of sound. I see if I can get in the zone (music) one, three for five (music).
Leah Roseman:
Can you show us just a regular bellows shake?
Michael Bridge:
Right. That would be out in, out in, (music)
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Michael Bridge:
Then there's a way to do three and not, you can do it with accents (Music), 1, 2, 3, 1 where you accent every third, but you can also do out in hit the top on the way closed, and that'll create a true three (music) where it's a cycle of three, then you can do four (Music). That one's actually, I think the hardest. And then Gubaidulina was like, okay, we got 2, 3, 4, 5, let's have five. I think it was 1986 when she wrote this. And they had to figure out how are we going to do five hits as a, not as a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, out, in, out, in, out, but as a single unit indivisible, where it's just a single unit is five (music). And that changed accordion playing from that moment onwards.
Leah Roseman:
Very, very cool. What you're about to hear is a clip from Michael's performance of Sofia Gubaidulina's Et Expecto and the full video from the Accordionist and Teachers Guild International is linked in the show notes. (music).
We talked a little bit about your thesis and analyzing Joe Macerollo's technical expressivity. So you had written that he has these concepts of time, tone, flow and space, which it sounds intriguing. Do you use these ideas with your own students?
Michael Bridge:
I might use somewhat different words or different ways of explaining it, but I actually do often borrow his terminology. He thought about it quite a bit, and I think it applies very well to music in general, but specifically to accordion. And I know how to relate those terms to the accordion time and tone or kind of a subunit, the first two and then the last two, if you will. So time and tone together, which are, as he puts it, the original DNA that go into any note. The rhythmic point, his term again of a note is when does it happen? And that's actually a really interesting question. When is the note? Is it when you push the key down? No, because the reed might not speak. Is it when the reed starts to make a sound? Maybe, but a better way to define it is when you get really the fullness of the sound achieved.
And on accordion, you're often working with multiple reeds, so you might have a different octaves of reeds that have to switch on. So we define the rhythmic point of a multi octave note, like different octaves of say, see as when the bass reed, the lowest reed has come on fully, because otherwise it's kind of like a squeaking sound or somebody who's not speaking from the belly where they're talking up here in the throat and it's not the same as getting a full belied sound. Forgive my lack of vocal training to properly say that. And I think that that parallels on violin as well, where you get the sound, but you don't get the fullness of the sound. And students probably struggle with the bow to find the right depth and pressure to get the immediacy of the attack. And on accordion, often you have to not just push the button, but starting a note is a combination of pushing the button and finding the right pressure with the bellows to support it, particularly for low notes, because too little pressure and it just won't speak together. Too much pressure and you can't activate the bass reeds, they just, they'll be delayed.
Leah Roseman:
This is the Ladom Ensemble in Brahms, Hungarian Dance number five (music).
Now, the scene in Europe is very different for accordion players, and you've toured there quite a bit.
Michael Bridge:
Oh, I really like it there. And to walk into a classroom, which I've done in several places in Poland, in Kiev, Ukraine, in France, Paris and Strasburg most recently in Helsinki at the Sibelius Academy, and there's minimum 10, maximum 30 accordion students sitting there waiting in all of those places to meet. That is one feeling that I never had growing up where I had tons of very competent peers that can push you, so to speak. So that is a different type of community. It probably means that they have fewer opportunities perhaps, but there is an incredible push and camaraderie as well, I hope. Yeah, so I think a quite different student experience perhaps there.
Leah Roseman:
Now, you've had premiered so many new works, and I'm presuming a lot of these composers maybe weren't so familiar with the accordion.
Michael Bridge:
Yes, that is a constant thing to deal with, and I won't characterize it in any other way because sometimes it's a true pleasure, sometimes it's difficult. The one thing that characterized my studies at U of T more than any other is that Joe was very insistent on me playing with other instruments and specifically not with accordion. I don't know if you know, we have this tradition among accordion of making accordion orchestras and ensembles, quintets, sextets, et cetera, but whole orchestras with 50 or a hundred accordions, and we have parts accordion one through six and then bass accordion, whatever. Sometimes they add percussion and it's quite something. As an orchestral musician yourself, you might appreciate seeing that briefly.
It's an oddity and it's really cool. But we have this introverted habit in the accordion world, and it's just much better to play with other instruments. You learn so much more, I think, although the camaraderie of an accordion orchestra is great for building cohesive studios. So anyways, I was always encouraged by Joe to play with as many different instruments as possible, and that basically meant all those student composers and professional composers that I've worked with, 90% of them had not written at all or very much for accordion. I remember it was at the beginning of my master's, myself and a percussionist, Michael Murphy is his name. We talked to one of the composition professors and said, "Hey, can we come to the forum, the composer's forum, and we'll present how to write for percussion", which is something that everybody definitely needs to know, but often has questions about. And then accordion, which is, I hope they want to know how to write for it, and it's a great asset in your toolkit as a composer. And they said, "we would love to have you. Please do come." And so we presented how to write for our instruments and said, if any of you write an accordion percussion duo, we will play it in a concert and you'll get a live recording minimum. And we made that promise and we shouldn't have because we got about 15 of them.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Michael Bridge:
Over a year. They came in and then we had to play them. Most of them were a pleasure, but no offense to student composers because you must cut your teeth somehow. You have to go through the process, but it's not quite so rewarding on our end to work through that, but it's very important work to do. So I try my best to never say no to at least doing a reading for a composer because I want people to write for accordion. So I have to be part of the process of helping people figure that out. So yes, and by now I have enough little PDFs that I've made up over time, and there are several very good manuals available that some accordionist I think have just gotten mad and written the whole thing out in their own way. And between a few of those books that are out there and freely available, I think we've kind of got it covered now. But it is a complicated instrument like with the free bass and the standard bass and the chin registers and the different octaves that it can produce spontaneously. It's not just like "these are the notes and go, these are the notes, here's the range. Go!" There's more questions than that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. One thing I've noticed occasionally with composers writing for violin is they know we can play very fast and fluidly, but it's not like every pattern feels good. So some things are extremely awkward. I'm guessing you might have some of the same experience.
Michael Bridge:
Oh, yes. I think the number one thing is that when somebody writes something very challenging and they tend to make the left hand part about as hard as the right hand part, which you can do for a pianist essentially, because the hands in theory have equal capabilities. In the case of an accordionist, your left hand is also operating the bellows, and it can't jump without making a jerkiness in the bellows, in the smoothness of the tone. And also you're basically working with four fingers, thumb you can only use in the outside row a little bit, but it's at a weird angle and the thumb is never as fast. It's good for pedal tones, but otherwise, so I mean, imagine playing the well-tempered clavier, but with four fingers on the left hand and five on the right, that's what you're dealing with.
So it's not impossible. But the left hand parts, I don't want to say they need to be easier, but well, they do. They need to be easier, and they also need to be thought out in a way that you can do with just four fingers. And a lot of people approach accordion as an alternative to piano or organ or something. But the real key I think, to writing well for accordion is to focus on the expressive capabilities of the bellows, which are, I would say nearly as much as a bow on a string instrument. The only thing missing for us is we don't have quite as much variability in bow pressure, like the different sounds and the faded gradation that you can make with a bow pressure. I would make those changes by changing a register and it's a little bit more quantized, and there are other tricks you can pull too to smooth it out, but shy of that, you have basically an organ that is as expressive as a string section. So that's really I think the best accordion writing such as by Sofia Gubaidulina ,
Who I think is my favorite composer who has written substantial amount of work for accordion. She got inside of it with her mind early on and went right to that. And it's incredible what she's written for the instrument. Every piece changed the game. She's got about 14 of them.
Leah Roseman:
I listened with great interest to your history of the accordion, which you did for the Massey lectures.
Michael Bridge:
You've done a deep dive. Thank you. I'm honored.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it was really comprehensive and fascinating, so I would point people to that if they're interested in the history of the accordion, A few things you talked about I found interesting such as how it used to be so popular and this tradition of door-to-door salesman and your ideas about the disadvantages of that in terms of children growing up with that.
Michael Bridge:
I wasn't around, but I imagine it was somewhat of a strange time, though it probably didn't seem that way, but you can't go door to door now and sell things in the same way. I think it's illegal or something. Or if you're not promoting a charity, I don't think you can do that. I'm actually not sure "more accordion salespeople!", but the link between business and sales and teachers commissions for getting their students on the right brand of accordion and then selling the parents another one every year just to make a little more profit. There was a whole network right here in Ontario and across Canada and the states of salesmanship. And a lot of people say, well, accordion didn't get on the rock and roll bandwagon. That's why it became less popular. But I don't think that's a very good explanation at all. I don't think that would be a satisfactory explanation, even if I thought it were true musically because rock and roll is just a different genre of music.
It requires different tools. I think that the business growth of accordion outpaced the artistic growth of the instrument briefly, like from about the thirties through the fifties. That was true in North America for sure. And eventually there was a reset. People weren't promoting free-bass. They were playing the basic chord systems on the left hand, and that just meant that you weren't free. You couldn't do challenging music to the same degree. There's one interesting story involving my professor, Joe, Joe Macerollo, when he met with Paul Creston, who in the early sixties was one of the biggest composers in the US, one of the top names, although he's somewhat, he kind of didn't make it into the canon, but he was big then. So the American Accordion Association commissioned him to write an accordion concerto, which he did, which I've played, and he wrote it for stradella bass, normal bass and a piano keyboard because they wanted a concerto that everyone could play, at least if you were good enough, if you worked hard enough that your accordion could play is the right way to say that.
So he did. But when I studied the piece and played it, I was thinking in this bit, it would've been so much better on free-bass. He's crying out for it, he's working around it, but if he had had this other keyboard layout available to him on accordion, it would've been so much easier for him. He could have realized a much better version of this idea that I can see him trying to do. And then Joe told me that he met with Creston in New York about five years after that concerto and showed him his free-bass accordion. Creston said, "well, wait, that's it. That's what everyone should be playing and what I should have written for, why wasn't I told about that?" And it emerged that, well, I mean they didn't tell him about it because they wanted a concerto that everybody could play at the time. Apparently he vowed to never write for accordion again, which whether or not that vow was so profoundly true, he didn't. He never did. I had this idea, and I kind of have a draft of a paper of great composers who wrote for accordion only once.
The slightly embarrassing phenomenon, he wrote two, but only two Hindemith wrote only once. Tchaikovsky wrote only once, but that was (singing) oom-chuck for like 30 seconds in the third movement of some, it wasn't a symphony, what is it, a concert piece for orchestra or something for accordions it calls for. And a whole bunch of composers dabbled briefly in accordion in the first half of the 20th century and never came back. Hindemith in his case, he wrote an excellent Kammermusik suite, number one, excellent accordion part, very virtuosic, very well thought out. In that case. He was apparently so disappointed with the accordionist who gave the premiere that he just never did it again. So I mean, there has to be a certain level that is met by the player, by the composer, et cetera, for all of this to work and for it to snowball. And coming back to your original question, I think that we didn't have enough of a intellectual level that had been developed and refined among the masses of accordion players and teachers in the thirties, forties, fifties. It was only a select few that were really thinking on that level, but it took much longer for that to slowly start to spread. It took one or two generations actually for that to really start to get out there.
Leah Roseman:
But as a result of these sales tactics, there were so many accordions.
Michael Bridge:
Everyone has one hiding in their attic.
Leah Roseman:
This is the Ladom Ensemble in JS Bach's Keyboard concerto number seven in G Minor, the first movement.(music)
Now you have a very long musical partnership. Do you want to talk about Bridge and Wolak?
Michael Bridge:
Yes. So Kornel Wolak, my duo partner of Bridge and Wolak, we've been working together for 11 years now. And the last six of those I would say have been very intense and serious. And before the pandemic, in fact, it was 2019, we were in the same traveling in parallel, sometimes in the same hotel room for six months of that year. And then the pandemic happened, and actually he was my main work partner during the pandemic. We bubbled together initially, remember bubbling? And he was my bubble for that first summer. We created a bunch of new arrangements. We created a mentorship program for youth to run online to help high school students who think they might want to study music or the arts. And we also built and created our orchestral show, Tangorium, which was arranged and written the scores by an amazing composer, arranger, Charles Cozens in Burlington, Ontario, who is one of the ultimate masters of this. I think this was his 22nd full length symphony show that he wrote cover to cover.
And he's done something like 2000 arrangements for orchestra, incredible how he can do this and super high quality or amazing stuff. So we met with him every week, every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM on Zoom, we called it church. And for a year it took to make that show and work out the ideas and build it. So we were very busy and then we were back to touring in 2021, mainly in the US. And we have learned together a great deal about the music business too, which in addition to performing and all that, we both teach in some capacities. Me in particular, I'm going to start a new course at University of Toronto in January about the business of music, specifically touring in the US as a Canadian, not just like how do you get the visa. Now, it's more about how do you earn their interest? What do you have to create as a program, how do you get into the showcases? How do you negotiate Americans versus Canadians because it is different, their subtleties and all of those types of things is what I'm going to be teaching. And that is something that I know because of Bridge and Wolak, because of the work that we've been doing. So there's a whole bunch of aspects to our marriage. Sorry. No, but the reason I said that is because I was thinking ahead in my head to tell you that actually when I started dating my girlfriend, my partner, she said, well, have you had any long-term relationships? Are you serious? Basically? And yes, I had actually on my dating resume, if you will, but I actually told her about Bridge and Wolak and I said, Hey, there's this guy. I've 11 years working together. We have bank accounts, a company together, we have commitments three years into the future. I can't not make it work with this guy. That's my resume in terms of a serious approach to a relationship with good communication and all of that. So
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Michael Bridge:
It goes that deep that that's what I told her. So
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's interesting with those kind of professional relationships, of course there's such a strong personal aspect, and as you say, you're touring together, sharing meals, but there isn't the romantic glue that holds you together. So all the other stuff has to work well.
Michael Bridge:
Yes, and there is a friendship glue, a brotherly glue. We're both only children. So there's that. But there's also, the way that we articulate it to others is we say there's a bigger belief in what we can do together being better and more important than what either one of us could do on our own because we have different skillsets as humans and in business and on stage and in arranging and in rehearsal and with our instruments, et cetera. The list goes on. So we're kind of better together and we know that, and we both do projects on the outside of that as well. I actually play in a quartet as well, the Ladom Ensemble.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I definitely wanted to ask,
Michael Bridge:
And solo works somewhat busy.
Leah Roseman:
I definitely wanted to circle around to Ladom Ensemble. It's such an interesting group, but before we leave your work with Kornel, I was just curious, will we be able to share some of a clip of some work you've done together?
Michael Bridge:
Definitely. We have tons, tons, of that.
Leah Roseman:
This is the Bridge and Wolak Duo with Digital Stardust based on a Bach Sicilienne. (music).
Now, you'd mentioned that you both bring different strengths to your partnership with Bridge and Wolak. What do you think you bring to that that's of benefit to him?
Michael Bridge:
On what level? I could answer that in 10 different ways.
Leah Roseman:
Your choice then
Michael Bridge:
In terms of operating what we do, and because the music is only a component of that, he's kind of the fire. He's the, we have to do it now. We have to get everything done now, and he cannot tolerate having a list of stuff. If he knows that something has to be done, he must do it now. So he brings a lot of energy and fire and all of that, and he's very bold with reaching out to people and calling or walking up to them and immediately engaging. I have learned some of that skill from him, and I use it myself, but that is me copying him.
I am the person that can take the pieces of the puzzle and assemble the puzzle and figure out what's the process towards, okay, we need this big show. How are we going to put it together? Do we actually have the right idea? And figuring out the tech elements. A lot of the arrangements, he provides ideas, but I actually have to do them the part that's getting more arranged, so to speak. And so he proposes a zillion ideas. I say no to most of it and what's left we do. So that's a little bit of a description maybe of the relationship, but I wouldn't get nearly as much done without him and he would probably get the wrong things done without me.
Leah Roseman:
Interesting. So Michael, in your Ladom ensemble, you play a different role in that group, don't you?
Michael Bridge:
It's interesting because in Bridge and Wolak, the clarinet is basically the melody instrument, and I'm kind of the harmony, the collaborative artist or the accompanist with digital accordion glorified accompanist. In Lado, I am, yes, it's shared around, but sometimes and often I am the melody instrument, the front man of the band, so to speak. And I do sit in the middle at the front though. Melody goes around between me, cello and piano. And then we have a hand percussion as well. But yeah, I play a lot more melody. I play a lot more single notes in La Dome. I often am not playing bass that's either cello or piano. And we can flip that around quite a bit. It's a very flexible kind of mini orchestra. We do have a string section. I'm the wind section, piano is all the other colors, and I guess the piano section too. And then we have percussion, which fills everything out. So it really does feel like a small orchestra and can sound like it too.
Leah Roseman:
How do you, I just thinking about the different roles you play as a performer, it must be so different. I mean, I've never played a solo with an orchestra. I'm a orchestral player, chamber music, and you're playing all these different roles. Do you feel in a way that there's a persona that comes out?
Michael Bridge:
Yes, definitely. Though it's still me. I have a certain stage personality which has just developed over some of my experiences. Of course, I am a fairly head up kind of person on stage. Even when I'm having to read the music, I'm trying to be up not only to communicate with the other musicians and to assume a role of leadership, but I'm a very big believer in performance and engaging performance. I talk a lot during concerts in both groups. We actually talk a lot and maybe part of that is my influence, the element that is true that is there in both groups, but we say a lot to our audiences and tell part of the story and also explain our weird instrumentations and our musical choices that way.
Leah Roseman:
It's so important to create a bridge to the audience
Michael Bridge:
Yes
Leah Roseman:
Matter what you're playing.
Michael Bridge:
And with respect to general classical music traditions and aesthetic, that is the biggest thing that is missing from classical, classical musicians, general presentation, and definitely from the orchestral world, which I observe a lot. My partner, she's in a very fine orchestra, and I've heard your orchestra, we didn't meet, but I did hear you when you were actually at Roy Thompson Hall,
And there's a lot of discussion in classical and in the orchestral world, how do we engage more audiences? How do we get more young people here? And I don't think that it needs to be gimmicky. I don't think drinks in the hall will do it, though. That's always a fun thing too. I think it's just about the human element and having communication, and that has to come from somebody talking to share the values of human existence. Not only explain how does the music work, but to make a, I'm not saying it has to be a social activism kind of stance in any concert because as an artist, you don't have to stand for anything. In fact, it's sometimes refreshing when people aren't sharing an agenda of any particular type, no matter how valid they may be. But just to show a real human element and a lot of personality on stage with a host of a show.
I'm thinking about orchestra right now, but I've thought a lot about what if every single orchestra show had a host? If the conductor doesn't want to talk, okay, I know they have a lot to do, they're very focused. But to have somebody all the time who welcomes people verbally and who stands on stage, I think other genres have got that figured out. And in the recital list area of classical music, solo piano recital, let's say, it is a lot to have to play also solo piano and then talk to, I understand why people need breaks, but maybe somebody else could do it. The real key though, in any talking is that it has to be good, really well thought out, not delivered as a script, but you have to go through the process of writing it out at least once so that then you can riff off of it and banter and then make it all natural after that. But most musicians, again, with respect, do not put the same level of preparation into their talking as they did 20 years of prep into their playing to be able to perform on that level. And I'm just saying, I think that's an area that I try to put that same effort in, and I think people respond to it, and I think all performers should consider that element.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I agree with you. Now, we had started at this conversation talking about the digital sounds that you've helped create for your digital accordion. And one thing I was running across in my research, yeah, the creative aspect in terms of the perception of volume by using different frequencies. The physics you had, I found very interesting.
Michael Bridge:
I was told that in, I guess it was probably a musical acoustics class. I took a lot of tech classes over the years and one teacher said, so here, two notes on the piano, C and D right next to each other, I'm going to try to play the mezzo forte, hear this, boom. Then he reached out his arms wide and played two notes C and D, but like five octaves apart. And we really had to sit there and think, okay, which one seems louder? And anyone, you can go try this at home. When you have a wider frequency spectrum, it will seem like there's more to it or that it's, maybe you'll perceive it as louder, but you'll at least perceive it as two things. Whereas two notes next to each other. Yeah, there's a harmony, but they're not two different things.
The reason for this is that in our ears, the cochlea, which is a coiled up seashell kind of thing, but the further, the lower the frequency, the further the sound wave goes into the cochlea and it's detected further, deeper within little high sound waves are very short and they get detected right at the beginning. So if you unravel it, you have physical real estate for high frequencies at the beginning and progressively lower frequencies further. So there are things called critical bands, which are all the separations along the way of what can you distinguish as being a different pitch?
How small of an area, what is the smallest critical band? And when you start to activate areas of the ear that are physically further away from each other, you're activating two different parts of that real estate, and therefore it sounds more complete because your brain just infers, okay, if we've got the low and the high, maybe it also infers that you have the middle there too. Usually you wouldn't have only very high and very low. You would have kind of everything in nature. So I think that's part of the reason maybe a physicist or a biologist could say more on that, but I did find that very interesting. And then applying that to music means if you're arranging and if you want to make something sound huge and thick, then you need to put all the frequencies there and make sure that on the biggest arrival of the song, I mean that's why crash cymbal and bass drum works so well in a march or in a symphony on the biggest moment. And I mean, it's a very natural thing. We just don't think about the fact of, okay, let's have everybody play. For the biggest part, it seems very natural, but it also makes sense on a physical level because then there's everything and you're getting stimulated or your ears are getting stimulated in every way. Also, you're getting stimulated visually in every way with an orchestra, when you see everybody doing it. I love that kind of stuff. And as maybe you saw in that video, I explained that in some of my sounds, I've added gongs or not gongs, tam tams is the better word, that really have a huge frequency spectrum. And I linked them so that when I play a bass note, there's a very soft tam tam in there, and you can't actually hear it when you're playing, but it's noise, good noise, and it fills out all the frequencies. So if I take it away, it sounds a little bit less rich, but if I put it in there, then it just sounds big and orchestral because of course, as one person, I'm trying to sound like a lot of people. So adding that little extra bit of dirty noise into the equation is one of the best secrets that I've found in terms of orchestration.
Leah Roseman:
Would you mind just showing us a couple of those things on your digital accordion?
Michael Bridge:
Sure. Just a second. Actually, I'll show you something that nobody's heard yet. This is an unreleased new sound that I've been working on. I simply tried to make the most unpleasant, usable sound that I possibly could. And it is kind of a worm that gets inside your mind. I called it Facebook. That's the working title right now.
We'll see if this mic can capture this. So I've layered (music) an accordion sound with sort of a guitar sound that's on a constant loop where it's changing the pitches (music), but it's over on the left hand is the reason why I just thought of this with the frequencies, because I programmed a very high rattle (music) with a very low sound. So there's (music) a super low bass note, but there's also that you can hear that coming through and it's very unpleasant and it sounds like you're getting stung by a bee or a needle or something like I don't know, horror movie type of thing. And then (music) I added some, (music) the free-bass, some other slightly more pitched notes. So the way that I intend this to be played is maybe I would do some (music) kind of rhythm there. I'm just making up notes. And then (music) over on the bass notes at will, I can go and hit one of those and we'll get that high and low rattle layered on top of this. And I think the whole thing is wonderfully unpleasant (music). So that's my Facebook for the moment.
Leah Roseman:
Very cool. What do you think are some of the more beautiful sounds on the accordion for contrast?
Michael Bridge:
Oh, now you want the nice stuff. Absolutely. Oh, that would probably be like this type of stuff, like the choirs, the outer space, things that I've done (music). I love tubular bell, but I've made all sorts of those types of things. I really like chapel organ sounds (music), and I've made a lot of slightly different variations of those (music). And those did not exist for digital accordion. There was a small organ and a big organ, and I programmed a whole bunch of varieties. I'm very proud of that because now, I've made 14 organs so that you can have kind of from biggest to smaller, small to big, and I think it's a usable pipe organ on accordion now, whereas that didn't exist before. And let me find something else. That's nice. Oh, this is nice. Tango romance (music) that's an original by Montreal composer, Denis Plante, that particular melody. But I made the sounds for it, so might as well play that with it.
Leah Roseman:
Very cool. Well, thanks so much for sharing all those examples. And I know there must be hundreds more.
Michael Bridge:
I can go all day on that. So it's good that we stop
Leah Roseman:
To wrap things up. I was wondering, it might be interesting just to talk briefly about your ideas in terms of both as a creative and as a teacher, the analytical versus the intuitive.
Michael Bridge:
Ah, yes. I love that topic in terms of how do you play your instrument, the technique of it. I first heard this example talking to vocalists, and I was told there are two ways to approach figuring out how to make a sound, which is, let's say this passage has to be angry. You can think of a time you were really angry. You can make yourself angry by recalling the memory, and then you be angry and you perform the music and it comes out angry. And of course that's a very effective method and it works very well.
Another way is to say, okay, what are the parameters of every note when it sounds angry? What is the shape of the note? What are the internal dynamics in it? What is the attack? What is the release? What is everything about every note? And to go into analytical detail and to understand it that way. And then if you need to be angry, or maybe I'll change the example to crying with the bellows, what I would do is small pushes forwards and back to continuously get a, which is kind of like a baby crying, and you have to kind of find the right speed of that oscillation. And then you can add some grace notes possibly quite far away, maybe about a sixth above or fifth above the pitch that you're actually trying to play. That sounds more like the voice cracking. And you can that and many other parameters and you can add that altogether and say, now I'm playing this way and that is how I play crying.
You can do that with any emotion. And these two approaches or schools of thought are probably both effective, but only the second one is kind of teachable in the sense of you can explain how it is that you're doing what you do. It's explicit in words in your head, and it can be said or written. So that's what I've tried to do in my thesis with Joe's techniques and Claudio Jacomucci and Geir Draugsvoll, my three interviewees to really lay it out on the page, how do they do what they do? And it's almost weird to talk about music in a written format, but it was actually so hard to do it without showing examples that I thought it was a good exercise, because when you only have words, you really have to describe it. You can't just "do it this way". And I think that's somewhere where we are going as maybe a culture. Maybe we overanalyze everything maybe, but we're talking now about as a culture, what makes good programming of a concert, what makes equitable programming. That's an interesting topic and what should be the considerations of that and and my duo, we've talked about this a lot. We have kind of some formulas that we use in our concerts for the flow of the pieces, and so we can change all the rep, but it's still the same concert for us because the slots are all filled in the same way. So understanding what you're doing on that level I think is a very important exercise. And I am an analytical person, is, you can tell probably partly because of the instrument that I play, which just requires so much thought and pre-programming of what you're going to do, which means you have to be aware of it. You can't just do it in the moment and replicate it by chance. So yeah, those are some thoughts about that.
What do you think?
Leah Roseman:
I think that we don't think about the intuitive because it is intuitive, but all good musicians. I think actually everybody, let me rephrase that. Everybody has deep feelings for music. It's our most important language as people, but the analytical helps us bring it to another level and be able to, yeah, I think in terms of teaching, I would answer. It depends on the student and depends on the context. There's a lot of variables of course. But yeah, I was curious in terms of view as a performer as well, because yes, it's evident you need so much analysis to be able to bring all these variables to play. So that's interesting for me. Well, we'll have to have you back on the podcast, but thanks so much for today. Really, really enjoyed it.
Michael Bridge:
My pleasure. Anytime.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. There's such a fascinating variety to life and music, and this series features wonderful musicians worldwide with in-depth conversations and great music. With over a hundred episodes to explore, many episodes feature guests playing music spontaneously as part of the episode, or sharing performances and albums. I hope that the inspiration and connection found in a meaningful creative life, the challenges faced and the stories from such a diversity of artists will draw you into this weekly series with many topics that will resonate with all listeners. Please share your favorite episodes with your friends and do consider supporting this independent podcast. The link is in the description. Have a great week.
