Accordions are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free reed aerophone type. The essential characteristic of the accordion is to combine in one instrument a melody section, also called the diskant, usually on the right-hand keyboard, with an accompaniment or Basso continuo functionality on the left-hand. The musician normally plays the melody on buttons or keys on the right-hand side, and the accompaniment on bass or pre-set chord buttons on the left-hand side. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist.
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.
Esa-Pekka Salonen is a Finnish conductor and composer. He is the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra in London and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2024, he announced his resignation from the San Francisco Symphony upon the expiration of his contract in 2025.
The Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin in Berlin, Germany, is one of the leading universities of music in Europe. It was established in East Berlin in 1950 as the Deutsche Hochschule für Musik because the older Hochschule für Musik Berlin was in West Berlin. After the death of one of its first professors, composer Hanns Eisler, the school was renamed in his honor in 1964. After a renovation in 2005, the university is located in both Berlin's famed Gendarmenmarkt and the Neuer Marstall.
Quartetto Gelato is a Canadian classical crossover quartet with current members Colin Maier, Matti Pulkki, Kirk Starkey, and Tino Popovic, and based in Hamilton, Ontario. Their musical repertoire consists of a mix of classical masterworks with tangos, gypsy, klezmer, jazz, and folk songs from around the world. They usually play without musical scores and their performances include elements of humour and dance.
Bruce Adolphe is a composer, music scholar, the author of several books on music, and pianist. He is currently Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Concerts of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where he has been a key figure since 1992. Adolphe performs his weekly "Piano Puzzler" segment on the nationally broadcast Performance Today classical music radio program hosted by Fred Child. "Piano Puzzler" was on National Public Radio starting in 2002, and is now on American Public Media. The program is also available as a podcast and from iTunes. Mr. Adolphe was also founding artistic director of Off the Hook Arts Festival, an interdisciplinary festival combining music, science, and visual arts, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, from 2010 to 2022.
Marjan Mozetich is a Canadian composer who has written music for theatre, film and dance, as well as symphonic works, chamber music, and solo pieces. He has written compulsory competition pieces for the 1992 Banff String Quartet Competition and the 1995 Montreal International Music Competition. Co-founder of Arraymusic in Toronto, Mozetich served as their artistic director from 1976 to 1978. After his work with Array, he worked for some time at the University of Toronto music library, and then became a freelance composer. Mozetich moved to Howe Island, near Kingston, Ontario, and taught composition at Queen's University in Kingston from 1991 to 2010. He has won several awards, including the first prize in the CAPAC (SOCAN)-Sir Ernest MacMillan Award. His major compositions include Fantasia... sul linguaggio perduto and Postcards from the Sky.
Aaron Zigman is a classically-trained American composer, producer, arranger, songwriter, and musician who has scored music for films including The Notebook, The Company Men, Bridge to Terabithia, John Q., The Proposal, Flicka, For Colored Girls, Flash of Genius, Sex & the City, Alpha Dog, and Escape from Planet Earth. He has also written, arranged and produced over 50 hit albums, and co-written songs with legendary and contemporary artists including Quincy Jones, Christina Aguilera, Phil Collins, Was, John Legend, Dionne Warwick, Ray Charles, Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, and Seal.
Geoffrey Grey was a British classical composer.
Lior Navok is an Israeli classical composer, conductor and pianist. He was born in Tel Aviv. Navok studied composition privately with the Israeli composer Moshe Zorman, and completed a Bachelor's degree at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where he studied composition and conducting. He later completed he studied for a Master's and Doctorate at the New England Conservatory, where he studied with John Harbison.
The accordion is in a wide variety of musical genres, mainly in traditional and popular music. In some regions, such as in Europe and North America, it has become mainly restricted to traditional, folk and ethnic music. Nonetheless, the button accordion (melodeon) and the piano accordion are widely taught and played in Ireland, and have remained a steady fixture within Irish traditional music, both in Ireland and abroad, particularly in the United States and Great Britain. Numerous virtuoso Irish accordion players have recorded many albums over the past century or so; the earliest Irish music records were made in the 1920s, in New York City, by fiddler and Sligo immigrant Michael Coleman, widely considered to have paved the way for other traditional musicians to record themselves. Accordions are also played within other Celtic styles, as well as in English traditional music, American traditional music, polka, Galician folk music, and Eastern European folk music.
John Serry Jr. is an American jazz pianist and composer, as well as a composer of contemporary classical music works that feature percussion, on which he also doubles. He is a son of the accordionist and composer John Serry. His debut solo album was 'Exhibition', for which he received a Grammy Nomination for his composition, 'Sabotage'.
Alan Shulman was an American composer and cellist. He wrote a considerable amount of symphonic music, chamber music, and jazz music. Trumpeter Eddie Bailey said, "Alan had the greatest ear of any musician I ever came across. He had better than perfect pitch. I've simply never met anyone like him." Some of his more well known works include his 1940 Neo-Classical Theme and Variations for Viola and Piano and his A Laurentian Overture, which was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1952 under the baton of Guido Cantelli. Also of note is his 1948 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra which was also premiered by the New York Philharmonic with cellist Leonard Rose and conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos. Many of Shulman's works have been recorded, and the violinist Jascha Heifetz and jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw have been particular exponents of his work both in performance and on recordings.
Rebecca Saunders is a London-born composer who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, Saunders' compositions received the third highest total number of votes (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35). In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked Skin (2016) the 16th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Tom Service writing that "Saunders burrows into the interior world of the instruments, and inside the grain of Fraser's voice [...] and finds a revelatory world of heightened feeling."
Michael Lazarevich "Misha" Geller was a Russian viola player and composer.
Krzysztof Aleksander Janczak is a Polish composer of film, classical and TV music, sound designer and musicologist.
Bernard Howard Gilmore was an American composer, conductor, French horn player, and Professor Emeritus of music at the University of California, Irvine. He is best known for his compositions, including Five Folk Songs for Soprano and Band which has become a reputable work in contemporary band music repertoire.
The Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto is one of several professional faculties at the University of Toronto. The Faculty of Music is located at the Edward Johnson Building, just south of the Royal Ontario Museum and north of Queen's Park, west of Museum Subway Station. MacMillan Theatre and Walter Hall are located in the Edward Johnson Building. The Faculty of Music South building contains rehearsal rooms and offices, and the Upper Jazz Studio performance space is located at 90 Wellesley Street West. In January 2021, the Faculty announced Dr. Ellie Hisama as the new Dean starting July 1, 2021.
Ezio Bosso was an Italian composer, pianist, double bass player, and conductor. He composed film scores such as Un amore and Gabriele Salvatores' Io non ho paura, and ballets which were performed by The Royal Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, among others. As a pianist, he released a solo album which entered the Italian charts.
Stuart Greenbaum is an Australian composer and Professor of music composition at the University of Melbourne. He served as Head of Composition from 2007 to 2023 at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
