Guy Klucevsek obit

Guy Klucevsek, accordion master with avant-garde verve, dies at 78

“They ask me what I play,” said Mr. Klucevsek, “and I say, ‘Accordion, but not that kind.’”

 He was not on the list.

Guy Klucevsek, an accordion virtuoso who ventured far beyond polkas with experimental compositions, minimalistic structures and wide-ranging collaborations such as backing performance artist Laurie Anderson and accompanying soprano Renée Fleming’s “Danny Boy” at the funeral of Sen. John McCain, died May 22 at his home in Staten Island. He was 78.

The cause was neuroendocrine cancer, said his wife, Jan Klucevsek.

The influence of Mr. Klucevsek (pronounced Kloo-SEV-ek) included pushing the boundaries of the accordion’s musical palette since the 1980s and extending the instrument’s reach into the worlds of dance, theater and concert halls as more than just a folksy backdrop.

In much the way that musical traditions were reinterpreted by bands such as the Klezmatics with klezmer and the Dropkick Murphys with sea shanties, Mr. Klucevsek helped recast the accordion as capable of roaming across musical genres, making it perhaps not quite hip, but nudged in that direction.

“But people still sort of roll their eyes when it comes up,” he told the San Jose Mercury News in 2005. “They ask me what I play and I say, ‘Accordion, but not that kind.’”

In the 1980s, he composed pieces such as “Tremolo No. 6 (Nucleic Chains)” that evoked the quivering pulse of electrical static and collaborated with modern dancer Maureen Fleming at Manhattan’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. In the 1990s, he performed on Anderson’s albums such as “Bright Red” (1994) and premiered a solo piece, “Bandoneons, Basil and Bay Leaves,” which New York Times music critic Alex Ross described as a “spellbinding stretch of slow-tango melancholy.”

Over nearly four decades, Mr. Klucevsek composed more than 100 pieces and recorded more than 20 albums as the featured soloist or as part of an international all-accordion group, Accordion Tribe, with Otto Lechner (Austria), Maria Kalaniemi (Finland), Lars Hollmer (Sweden) and Bratko Bibic (Slovenia). Mr. Klucevsek also became a sought-after sideman.

He played with the Boston Pops on the 2017 album “Lights, Camera, Music!” dedicated to the cinema scores of former Pops conductor John Williams, and was part of saxophonist-composer John Zorn’s “The Big Gundown” (1986) with radically revised covers of songs by the Italian film composer Ennio Morricone.

For films, Mr. Klucevsek contributed to Williams’s scores on movies directed by Steven Spielberg including “The Terminal” (2004), “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008), and “The Adventures of Tintin” (2011).

In 2018, Mr. Klucevsek joined a string quartet at Washington National Cathedral for the funeral of McCain (R-Arizona). Opera great Fleming sang “Danny Boy” as McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain, choked back tears.

The somber moment was something of a departure for Mr. Klucevsek, who often brought a playful irreverence to his performances and compositions. He said it took him a while to make peace with (albeit sometimes ironically) the old dancehall image of accordions from “The Lawrence Welk Show” and polka fests.

“Humor was often associated with not being serious. But the thing that I eventually came to realize is that writers do it all the time,” Mr. Klucevsek said in a 2020 interview with the music blog “Do the M@th.” “Humor is a part of my personality, why should I have to throw all that away when I walk onstage and when I sit down to write a piece?”

He joined with accordion master Pauline Oliveros and two others in a group they called Four Accordions of the Apocalypse. Some of his most iconoclastic compositions have titles that bordered on the surreal.

“Eleven Large Lobsters Loose in the Lobby” (1991) is a percussive piece of rapping on an accordion with taps and clicks that sound like snapping claws; “Sea Chandeliers for Gamelan” (1985) suggested a traditional Indonesian percussion ensemble; and “Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse” (1988) is a discordant sway between accordion, violin and cello.

The 1994 album “Transylvanian Softwear” features tunes inspired by the cartoon Road Runner and Jewish Orthodox wedding music and portrays an Eastern European cowboy wannabe in “Three Microids: Bustin’ Broncos in the Balkans.”

Mr. Klucevsek often insisted he wasn’t anti-polka. Some of his songs paid homage to his roots in Slovenian-style polka, and he reveled in other accordion traditions such as Cajun zydeco and Tex-Mex cantatas. “The accordion,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “sort of has a new respect now.”

During an appearance in 1988 on the PBS children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” he played some of the old classics.

“For me, it was like coming full circle,” he said. “Now I had a chance to play accordion on television and just maybe there would be one child out there watching for whom the accordion would spark an interest, and perhaps even a life, in music.”

As seen on TV

Guy Allen Klucevsek was born in Manhattan on Feb. 26, 1947, and spent part of his childhood in Saddle Brook, New Jersey.

One day when he was 5 years old, he saw accordionist Dick Contino on a television talent show. He immediately asked his father, who worked as a window washer, to buy him an accordion. “He said, ‘They’re expensive, so if in another year you still want to play, we’ll get you one,’” Mr. Klucevsek recalled, “but I wore him out after six months.”

Later, after moving to the Pittsburgh suburb of Springdale, he began formal accordion lessons. In high school, he formed a band, the Fascinations, that dished out Slovenian polkas and waltzes. He also played tuba in the school band.

“I don’t think you’d take up the tuba to meet girls,” he joked. “No offense to my tuba colleagues, but there are probably easier paths to that.”

Tuba, however, was the only music major available at the Indiana State Teachers College in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The school became Indiana University of Pennsylvania when he was a sophomore, and he enrolled in the new course of arts and music. “But I was the only student, so I got to take private lessons for my last two years there,” he said.

He graduated in 1969 and received a master’s degree in music from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971. He was on the music faculty of Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in New Jersey from 1972 to 1976 and later was part of a Philadelphia-based chamber ensemble, Relâche.

His first album, “Blue Window” (1986), included some of his own compositions and inspired a concert project called of avant-garde commissioned works “Polka From the Fringe.” “Remember,” he told Chicago’s Reader, “this isn’t weird music for polka people, these are polkas for weird people.”

Over his career, Mr. Klucevsek performed around the world and contributed to various cross-cultural exchanges with musicians such as Basque accordionist Kepa Junkera, Iraqi American oud player Rahim AlHaj and Japanese composer Teiji Ito.

Declining health forced Mr. Klucevsek to stop most of his touring in 2018. In one of his last public appearances, Mr. Klucevsek was part of a quartet in 2022 in Staten Island playing scores in the performance piece “Little Amal Walks,” which features a 12-foot puppet representing a Syrian refugee girl as a symbol of displaced people everywhere.

Mr. Klucevsek’s wife of 55 years, the former Jan Gibson, is his only immediate survivor.

Among Mr. Klucevsek’s accordion tales, a favorite was from a 1976 bicentennial event in Philadelphia. Mr. Klucevsek’s trio was scheduled to perform after a caretaker from the Philadelphia Zoo displayed a cobra and showed how to extract its venom.

“So he milked the cobra,” Mr. Klucevsek recalled, “and when he was finished, he said, ‘If you thought this was weird, wait ’til you see what comes next.’ And that was the introduction.”

Music Department

Rachelle Garniez, Pauline Oliveros, Stephen Pellegrino, Nicole Renaud, Guy Klucevsek, Joshua Camp, and William Schimmel in Accordions Rising (2015)

Accordions Rising

8.1

musician

2015

 

Elizabeth Banks, Chris Pine, and Michael Hall D'Addario in People Like Us (2012)

People Like Us

7.0

musician: accordion (uncredited)

2012

 

Jamie Bell and Joe Starr in The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

The Adventures of Tintin

7.3

musician: accordion (uncredited)

2011

 

Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, and Ray Winstone in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

6.2

musician: accordion (uncredited)

2008

 

The Movement of People Working

6.9

Video

musician: accordion

2003

 

Family Secret (2000)

Family Secret

6.3

musician: accordion, The Bantam Orchestra

2000

 

Médecins de coeur (1993)

Médecins de coeur

musician

1993

 

Composer

Chinoiserie Redux (2022)

Chinoiserie Redux

Composer

2022

 

Tuncel Kurtiz in Tuncel Kurtiz ve Dostlari (2010)

Tuncel Kurtiz ve Dostlari

7.1

TV Mini Series

composer (as Guy Kluscevek)

2010

1 episode

 

Behind the Bellows: A Documentary About the Accordion (2009)

Behind the Bellows: A Documentary About the Accordion

composer

2009

 

Ilaria Occhini and Dorotheea Petre in Mar nero (2008)

Mar nero

6.7

Composer

2008

 

September Eleventh: Eyewitnesses

Short

Composer

2002

 

Family Secret (2000)

Family Secret

6.3

Composer

2000

 

Producer

Rotation (2021)

Rotation

Video

executive producer

2021

 

Soundtrack

Anna Kendrick in Rocket Science (2007)

Rocket Science

6.5

performer: "The Blob"

2007

 

Self

Behind the Bellows: A Documentary About the Accordion (2009)

Behind the Bellows: A Documentary About the Accordion

Self

2009

 

Accordion Tribe (2004)

Accordion Tribe

7.5

Self

2004

 

Lenny Meledandri and Fred Rogers in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968)

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

8.8

TV Series

Self

1988

1 episode

. Over his career, he composed over 100 works, released more than 20 albums, and collaborated with artists such as John Zorn, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, and Bill Frisell. He was also active in cross-cultural collaborations and contributed to several John Williams film scores. In 2010, he received a United States Artists Fellowship. He stopped touring in 2018 due to illness and died in 2025.