"Canons, fugues, ricercare, palindrome and mirroring forms, labyrinths, pendulums and other contrapuntal inventions from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of Fugue, Musical Offering, Goldberg Variations, and by XX Century and contemporary composers".

I started working on this project in 2019, after reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. The book explores common themes in mathematics, visual art and music and describes how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. This book gave me a completely different perspective on the works I was already studying: Bach’s Art of Fugue, Musical Offering and Nancarrow’s studies. I never thought about the similarities between a work by M.Escher and a fugue by J.S.Bach before!
I begun to think of an empty room with multiple planes. A mirror room, for instance. When you enter the room, the mirrors dub, transpose, flip, reverse, augment, diminish your figure. If you start moving the mirror will create a complex visual counterpoint of moving figures, a transversal dialogue through the planes. In a fugue, the matrix (theme, subject) undergoes similar transformations. The idea of the room, of the visualisation of the sonic material in 3D made everything clearer to my hears.
But how to make these structures clearly audible on the accordion? How can I revive this music so that it gives the listener the sense of the space, of the breath, of the dialogue through the planes, of the hidden drawings behind the notes?
With the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 corona virus in Europe in 2020 the extra-isolation gave me the opportunity to figure out how to realise my ideas.
I mostly used my inner hearing as primary instrument, without playing the musical instrument. Learning this music by heart without touching the instrument is the most useful practise I’ve ever done. On the accordion it’s relatively simple to put together 2, 3, 4 even 5 voices, fingers can do it quite easily, but music may sound quite mechanical and compressed in one dimension, mostly for the limited independence of expression of dynamic, articulation, phrasing and tempo. This is very true for the accordion, but also for the harpsichord and organ.
What is very hard is listening to the behaviour of the voices all the time. If we listen in a two-dimensional way, the horizontal and the vertical plane, we may completely miss those sound constellations that emerge only between the layers, transversely.
With silent practising I could hear the voices more globally, like in choral or orchestral music, but still with the timbre of the accordion.
So I had to experiment technical means that could respond to the way I understand and image this music.
The interpretation of a score depends primarily on the aesthetic of that music. Since I was a student in the Netherlands I’m familiar with Historically Informed Performing of Baroque music, I’ve studied the work of musicians who resuscitated ancient music interpretations like Ton Koopman, Frans Brüggen, Anner Bylsma, René Jacobs, Cafè Zimmermann, Giardino Armonico. I learned the basic performing “rules” which are very important to access the style.
Finally, all these perceptive, aesthetic and technical matters have to cooperate in the process of re-creation, re-composition of the written work that may be called “transcription”. Rather than being graphic operations, these transcriptions represent the way I listen to this music at this stage of my life.