Music for 12 Accordions is a project built around new works by media artist and composer Georgiy Potopalskiy and composer Alla Zagaykevych. Bringing together a concert, an installation, and a public programme, it explores the qualities of sound, practices of listening, and the perception of time. 

It began with Georgiy Potopalskiy's idea to create an acoustic work following the principles of electronic music. The composition is made up of algorithmically generated blocks. Its performance unfolds in a way more typical of multichannel electronic music than of an academic concert. Yet rather than digitally simulating acoustic instruments, it reverses the direction of imitation: sound, that is produced mechanically through the bellows, valves, and reeds of twelve accordions, attempts to pass itself off as synthesised.

"XIIB" is Georgiy's first acoustic work and the first acoustic work known to us built on this concept. We present it both as a concert and as a 12-channel installation, not opposing but embracing different modes of existence for the same sound, and how its perception shifts depending on the conditions of listening: fixed or unbounded time, your position in space, the presence of others or accompanying events.

Alla Zagaykevych's "Corpus Caeleste," in the concert program, continues this creative approach, and dedicates the work to the founder of algorithmic music in Ukraine — Leonid Hrabovsky (b. 1935) — and his follower, Danylo Pertsov (2073–1921). The title alludes both to medieval polyphonic genres and to the realm of celestial bodies. Pertsov wove the emission spectrum of the star Meissa, the head of the Orion constellation, into his works — until the pandemic terminated the composer's earthly run.

The accordions form a circle both in space around the listeners and by design. The instrument is timbrally related to the organ, whose many-voiced nature influenced the emergence of the synthesiser. Baroque polyphony and algorithmic composition are separated by several centuries, yet despite this distance, they turn out to be surprisingly close.

In works presented through the Music for 12 Accordions project, time flows non-linearly, sounds are disguised, lurking from all sides. An idea born more than seven years ago is coming to life in the midst of a period of chaos, revealing how we perceive what we hear today, how we listen (strain to hear), how we lose, fight for, and put time in order.