"To me there is always new music to explore – traditional music, Indian music, electronic music, everything."

Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli will be a familiar face to anyone who has enjoyed Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in recent years. Most recently he collaborated with Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart to perform Naomi Pinnock’s Oscillare in 2010; previously he has been featured both as a soloist and as part of the group Poing. At hcmf// 2011 he appears with the Trondheim Soloists in the opening concert on Friday 18 November, playing a new work by hcmf// Composer in Residence Bent Sørensen.

Born in 1975, Haltli studied at the Norwegian State Academy of Music, then at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory. With his fellow Poing members Rolf-Erik Nystrøm and Håkon Thelin, he is an artistic director of this year’s Ultima contemporary music festival, which takes place in Oslo in September. His other current projects include recording the first CD compilation of Arne Nordheim’s accordion music.

hcmf//: How did you start playing accordion?

Frode Haltli: I started to play when I was six years old. I don’t know why. I just wanted an accordion for Christmas. I grew up in quite a small place, but I had two brothers who were also into music, so there was a lot of music in our home. But no-one else was really interested in what I was interested in, so I had to go to the music library an hour away to find classical and jazz music.

I won a competition when I was 15 or 16 years old, it was called Talentiaden, a talent competition. In the finals I played a Russian neo-romantic piece. This was on national TV and there was only one channel at the time, so I got a lot of attention from it. I had already started to play contemporary music then, mainly Nordic contemporary music such as Arne Nordheim. My little brother is a jazz trumpet player so we played together almost every day and I also became interested in traditional Nordic folk music.

Then I started to study music in Oslo and then in Copenhagen. I studied in the classical music department, although the accordion is not a classical instrument. I played transcriptions; I still play Bach almost every day. I play classical music because it’s good for me; but I mainly played contemporary music when I started to study. For my final exam, which was a public concert, I had a commission from Bent Sørensen, his only piece for accordion so far before this new one, a solo piece called Looking On Darkness. That was an important piece for me. It was something new in accordion music and it also inspired me in my improvisation and my way of playing.

Did people find it unusual for you to be studying accordion in a classical music department?

In the village where I grew up people accepted what I was doing. I did a lot of concerts locally and around Norway. It was only when I started to study that I realised that my instrument wasn’t totally accepted in the classical world. I met all these violin and piano players from well educated homes, who were born into this central European classical tradition, and this was a totally strange world to me. The only classical music I listened to in my childhood was what I found in the music library; there was no system to it, so I lacked a lot of knowledge about classical music. But that also made me really keen on finding out things.

So yes, I noticed that I was a strange bird. But I never really cared much. I played with the jazz department and I played chamber music with strings, percussion, guitar and wind players. I’m very aware that my instrument is outside the classical tradition. But I have no problems with that. I think it’s a good position to have.

Is it hard to find suitable repertoire for accordion in contemporary music?

I wouldn’t say so. Firstly, I’m very interested in lots of different music, so to me there is always new music to explore – traditional music, Indian music, electronic music, everything. But I would also say there’s a lot of repertoire in contemporary music. I still have a lot of pieces that I want to play and haven’t yet, that have been written for other accordion players. Accordion is a very popular instrument among contemporary composers in certain countries: maybe not so much in Britain, but in Scandinavia there’s a lot and in Germany there’s a huge amount. I’ve just realised that Wolfgang Rihm has more pieces for accordion than I knew of, and I’m still discovering new works.

Are there any accordionists whose playing has influenced you?

I’m more inspired by other musicians in general. Maybe what inspired me most from accordion players is the way bandoneón players play. I discovered Ástor Piazzolla many years ago, and later Dino Saluzzi, and from them I learned a lot about phrasing and how to make the instrument breathe more. Too many accordionists just play on the keys and forget about the bellows and the actual soul of the instrument. When I work with a composer, I always try to make him or her understand what the instrument is about, that it’s a wind instrument and a key instrument. Part of the problem is that the key system of the accordion is very virtuosic; it’s easy to play fast. That has led to a culture where a lot of accordionists play very fast all the time but they forget the bellows and the dynamics; there’s no phrasing.

At hcmf// in 2007 you performed music from the album Passing Images. Can you explain how you approached combining folk music with more contemporary styles?

I started to play newer folk music, dances like waltzes and polkas, when I was about ten years old. A little later I became interested in the older folk music, the dances, songs, instrumental music and also music for specific uses such as getting the children to bed or bringing home the cattle. What I wanted to do on Passing Images was to treat this music with respect, but also take it somewhere I felt it hadn’t been yet. There’s a big wave of young folk musicians in Norway and they’re also trying to modernise this music. But very often to me it sounds quite dull. On Passing Images, in most of the tracks you can hear the original clearly for a while, but it goes in and out and into quite free improvisations. I consider this a CD of re-compositions, in a way.

What was actually a little bit difficult was to convince the other musicians to go fully into this contrast that appears, going from a very tonal, familiar music to something far-out in just a few seconds. Not many improvising musicians do it this way. I had Arve Henriksen and Maja Ratkje on the record and as performers they mainly work with improvisation, so I think it was very strange for them in the beginning.

What is the story behind Wach Auf!, the most recent album from your group Poing?

Poing has always been like a laboratory, trying out new things. In the first years, we only worked with very young composers, students like us. In the past five years we’ve worked with more established composers but we also have side projects all the time. We’ve had this Wach Auf! project for ten years. It started out that the night before each Labour Day, we would do a concert in a really ‘brown’ pub –an old, traditional pub that people have been sitting in for many years. I guess there’s more of these pubs in England than in Norway, actually.

It started out with Weill/Brecht and we made our own versions of these sounds, but then we expanded to include other working songs, different revolutionary music. It’s just a huge source of interesting music and lyrics. We reached a lot of new audiences in Norway with this CD, because some of the songs are quite well known there among people who are interested in politics and the labour movement. We don’t do the songs as they did them in the ‘70s, but even the old hippies, they seem to like the way we do them. A lot of the songs have a really strong message but it’s not like we’re trying to convince people. Our attitude has always been more to ask questions than to give answers.

What can you tell us about the new Bent Sørensen piece that you’ll be playing at hcmf// 2011, It is pain flowing down slowly on a white wall?

What I’m really looking forward to with this piece is playing with the strings. We play a lot in the same register and I think it will sound really interesting together. Bent is not a very theoretical composer. In some ways he’s like a traditional composer in the sense that he writes by hand. A lot of composers today cut and paste a lot, but I don’t think he does. It’s more intuition.

I think he creates this slightly scary atmosphere. There will be something there that you think you might have heard before, but surrounded by something more blurry. He really knows how to write for strings, so to me it looks like the strings will surround the accordion, in a way. It’s not like a normal concerto with the soloist in the front and the orchestra making the accompaniment. I think it will sound more like a huge, strange accordion with string sounds!

Click here to buy tickets for Frode Haltli performing with the Trondheim soloists at hcmf// 2011 on Friday 18 November.

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