Maestro Carmen Carrozza of Thornwood

By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
The Journal News
(Original Publication: March 22, 2007)

THORNWOOD - Even though his first teacher "played lousy accordion," Maestro Carmen Carrozza, a revered concert accordionist, says he understood the mechanics of it.

"I knew what it was supposed to sound like," said Carrozza, 86, a Thornwood resident for 40 years.

Not only did Carrozza eventually learn to play well, he is widely credited with elevating the accordion as a concert instrument.

"Carmen Carrozza was the first accordionist invited to perform as featured soloist with major symphony orchestras," said Linda Soley Reed, 63, president of the American Accordionists' Association, which has 700 members. "He introduced the instrument to the classical world."

The accordion experienced its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Carrozza appeared at such prestigious concert halls as Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center. But by the late '60s, the instrument was already losing out in popularity.

"It's called the guitar," said Soley Reed. "All the young kids wanted to be rock stars."

A lack of young blood wanting to take up the accordion, bringing the passion that encourages contemporary composers to write for it, remains a challenge today. In an effort to boost the accordion's image, the association in 2002 created the Carmen Carrozza Scholarship Fund and will hold its next fundraising dinner March 25 in Wallkill.

The purpose is to grant a $5,000 music scholarship each year to a young contestant who participates at the association's annual competition.

"We hope to encourage young people to perform the works commissioned by the AAA over the years, and to also reach out to new composers, " said Joseph Ciccone, chairman of the Carrozza scholarship fundraiser dinner.

Carrozza was born in Calabria, Italy, and moved with his parents to Chappaqua in 1930 at age 9. His parents, farm laborers in New Castle, knew early on that their son was musically inclined.

"They arranged violin classes for me. I learned it for two years, and then my teacher moved away," he said. Then a family friend introduced the portable bellows-operated instrument to Carrozza. His teacher soon realized he had a gift and advised the boy's parents to send him to the Pietro Deiro Accordion Conservatory in Greenwich Village.

"My uncle drove me to the city every Friday while I was attending the Horace Greeley High School," Carrozza said.

By the time Carrozza was in his teens, he had decided to pursue a career as a concert artist. In 1937, he graduated from the conservatory and continued his studies at the New York Academy of Music, where he specialized in theory, harmony, counterpoint and composition.

His professional debut was in 1947 at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Three years later he married his wife, Jean; they have two children and two great-grandchildren.

Carrozza met with famous composers to encourage them to write solo pieces for the instrument. "The composers would say: 'Get out of here. You can't have have a solo accordion performance at a major symphony orchestra,' " Carrozza said.

But his persistence paid off and, in 1957, the famous composer Paul Creston, after hearing Carrozza play, wrote "Prelude and Dance," which Carrozza performed with the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler.

Carrozza, who suffered a stroke in 2005, cannot play the accordion any longer, but hopes to one day enjoy someone else playing and returning the instrument to the mainstream.

"My dream is to see the accordion back in the limelight," he said while sitting next to his wife.