Guy Klucevsek, a masterly accordion player who developed an eclectic body of work for his beloved, if sometimes mocked, instrument that expanded its repertoire well beyond polkas and other traditional fare, died on May 22 at his home on Staten Island. He was 78.
His wife and only immediate survivor, Jan (Gibson) Klucevsek, said the cause was pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.
Praise for Mr. Klucevsek (pronounced kloo-SEV-ek) typically noted that he had elevated the profile of the accordion beyond the realms of beer halls and “The Lawrence Welk Show.”
Writing in The Village Voice in 2015 about a series of performances by Mr. Klucevsek in the East Village, Richard Gehr noted that, “having mastered the instrument in virtually all of its classical, modern, jazz and international manifestations,” Mr. Klucevsek “has extended it into another dimension altogether.”
He recorded more than 20 albums, composed dozens of pieces and commissioned others, in multiple genres. He accompanied the performance artist Laurie Anderson on her 1994 album, “Bright Red,” and collaborated with the dancer Maureen Fleming on “B. Madonna,” a 2013 multimedia piece based on the myth of Persephone.
In 1993, he premiered two compositions for Dance Theater Workshop in Manhattan: “The Palatine Light,” based on a maritime theme, and “Fallen Shadows,” about aging opera singers, which included an accordion solo that Alex Ross described in The New York Times as a “spellbinding stretch of slow-tango melancholy.”
Mr. Klucevsek is probably best known for a project called “Polka From the Fringe,” a collection of more than two-dozen polkas that he commissioned a diverse group of composers to write in the mid-1980s in various styles, with titles like “Polka Dots and Lasers Beams” (by Guy De Bievre), “Diet Polka” (Daniel Goode) and “From Here to Paternity Polka” (Steve Elson).
“When some of them asked me what a polka is, I volunteered nothing beyond its meter and major key,” Mr. Klucevsek told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1990, three years after making a splash when he performed the polkas at the New Music America festival there.
The project helped him make peace with the polkas that he knew from a childhood spent among fellow Slovenian Americans in western Pennsylvania.
“I had grown up with polkas and then disowned them,” he told The Inquirer. “When I was playing with John Zorn” — the saxophonist, composer and longtime fixture of the downtown scene — “in New York, he loved polkas and made me play what I was ashamed of. He loved the garbage as much as the diamonds, but he made me realize that it’s OK to mind your own past.”
He added: “The funny thing is that these polkas have gotten me concerts I never would have had otherwise.”
“Polka From the Fringe,” which he recorded with his Ain’t Nothin’ but a Polka Band, was originally released in the early 1990s and reissued in 2012 on the Starkland label.
Guy Allen Klucevsek was born on Feb. 26, 1947, in Manhattan, and spent part of his early childhood in Saddle Brook, N.J. At age 5, he watched the accordion master Dick Contino perform on television and pestered his father, Godfred, a window cleaner, to buy him an accordion. When he was 6, his father got him a child-sized accordion.
At age 9, after his parents divorced — his mother, Alyse (Hamilton) Klucevsek, had abandoned the family — Guy moved in with an aunt and uncle in Springdale, Pa., near Pittsburgh, who found an elite accordion teacher, Walter Grabowski. Mr. Grabowski trained Guy from 1955 to 1965, in classical music, polkas and waltzes. He also introduced him to composers of music for the accordion that “instantly felt and sounded natural on my instrument,” Mr. Klucevsek told the Belgian radio station Radio Panik in 2021.
In high school, Mr. Klucevsek performed in a band called the Fascinations, which covered pop tunes — he favored instrumentals like “Walk Don’t Run” — and played waltzes and polkas.
Mr. Klucevsek graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in music theory and composition; two years later, he earned his master’s degree in the same subjects from the University of Pittsburgh. From 1972 to 1975 he taught at the Acme Accordion School, in Westmont, N.J., where the director introduced him to avant-garde music for the instrument.
In 1978, he joined the Relache Ensemble, a chamber group dedicated to new music.
“He played and wrote for us — and had already begun his solo career — and he was fantastic,” Joseph Franklin, a founder and former artistic and executive director of the ensemble, said in an interview. “His legacy will say that he wasn’t just a great accordionist, but he was a great musician.”
Mr. Klucevsek was not replaced as Relache’s accordionist after he left in 1990.
When Mr. Klucevsek appeared on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in 1988, he played part of one of his compositions, “Scenes From a Mirage,” and answered Fred Rogers’s questions about whether he expressed sadness, anger and happiness on his instrument.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you can’t tell somebody how you feel, but when you’re alone, you can express it through your instrument.”
In 1996, Mr. Klucevsek formed Accordion Tribe with four European accordionists: Bratko Bibic of Slovenia, Lars Hollmer of Sweden, Maria Kalaniemi of Finland and Otto Lecher of Austria. The group released three albums and was the subject of a documentary, “Accordion Tribe: Music Travels” (2004), before it disbanded in 2010.
His credits also include contributions to John Williams’s scores for the Steven Spielberg films “The Terminal” (2004), “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008) and “The Adventures of Tintin” (2011). Among his other albums are “Who Stole the Polka?” (1991), “Free Range Accordion” (2000) and “The Well-Tampered Accordion” (2005).
With his health failing in 2018, Mr. Klucevsek and the Diderot String Quartet accompanied the soprano Renée Fleming when she sang “Danny Boy” at the memorial service of Senator John S. McCain at the Washington National Cathedral in 2018.
“He was musically prepared for it, but carrying the instrument was a problem,” Ms. Klucevsek said in an interview.
Four years later, he composed music for “Little Amal Walks,” a performance piece in which a 12-foot puppet, representing a Syrian refugee girl, appeared on Staten Island.
As puppeteers moved Little Amal around the Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, Mr. Klucevsek followed along, playing his accordion from the back of a golf cart, as the three other musicians in their quartet walked.
“It wasn’t that difficult for him because it was only a few tunes,” Ms. Klucevsek said. “But he really pushed himself in the recording sessions” — for which he added more music to complete a CD, “Little Big Top,” which was recorded in his living room because he could not travel. He further exerted himself for a concert last November at the Roulette performance space in Brooklyn to promote the CD.
“He performed well,” Ms. Klucevsek said. “You wouldn’t know he was sick.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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