Accordionist Guy Klucevsek and his producers must have sensed that two CDs of “polkas, pseudo-polkas, and decimated polkas” might warrant explanation—and a good dose of humor. The liner notes explain how, back in the 1970s and 1980s, Klucevsek invited his colleagues to unite under a “Polka freak-flag,” commissioning a variety of composers to write boundary-stretching polkas for the accordion.Footnote ¹ The resulting twenty-nine track album—compiled from recordings originally released in the 1980s and 1990s—is infused with Klucevsek's prankster spirit and sense of irony, elevating the popular genre to the level of art while deflating the pretense of art music traditions.

Klucevsek's training helps explain the album's contradictory impulses. He studied classical accordion from his teens and received formal training in composition during college, but the latter experience especially left him frustrated by the instrument's marginalization in the world of “serious” music. As he explains, “Getting the accordion (and myself) taken seriously. . .meant avoiding music that reinforced accordion stereotypes.” He put the polka down and favored instead solo accordion works, such as Virgil Thomson's Lament and Henry Cowell's Perpetual Rhythm. But Klucevsek eventually rediscovered the polka, at which point he pursued not its standard traditions, but its “fringe”: something outside the mainstream that would challenge audiences’ expectations for the instrument, and which might convince them that polka could be Art.

Klucevsek's claims to American folk traditions also help explain the album's polka-as-Art concept. The composer describes himself and the polka as rooted in the American landscape and working class, explaining that his upbringing in a “Slovenian-American family in western Pennsylvania's coal-mining country in the 1950s” meant that he was immersed in polka from his early years. Klucevsek uses his and the polka's folk origins to make a politically charged turn in positioning the album: as emphasized three times in the liner notes, the composer imagined his work in part as a response to Charles Mingus's dismissive quip, “Let the white man develop the polka.” Klucevsek's reasoning reflects his own personal sense of humor and moment in political history, but also situates the polka as an answer to American jazz traditions. Polkas, and especially forward-looking ones like those of Polka from the Fringe, have the potential to become another American, folk-derived art form according to this reasoning.

In keeping with Klucevsek's envelope-pushing aims, few of the album's tracks actually contain the straightforward oom-pahs of traditional polkas. Instead, most follow the invocation of the collection's opening track to “add a little rhythm/Spice up that thing” and might best be described as, in Klucevsek's words, “avant-garde two-steps.” Three in particular stand out among the collection. Composer Bobby Previte contrasts an improvisatory, fiddle-filled introduction with layers of catchy, rock-inspired ostinatos in his “Nova Scotia Polka.” Klucevsek's own “Some of that ‘Old Time Soul’ Polka” is performed with contagious enthusiasm (and maybe even reckless abandon). An unsettling tension between lyrics and music beguiles listeners in Dick Connette's “Wild Goose;” the song's text describes the pulling of teeth and mosquitoes’ mutilation of a sweetheart's body, but the music is exceptionally sweet, melodic, and lulling. Other tracks risk gimmick when they focus on particularly ironic juxtapositions, like Mary Ellen Child's “Oa Poa Polka,” a pointillistic take on the genre; Daniel Goode's “Diet Polka,” a minimalist work; and Rolf Groesbeck's “Polka I,” which might be best described as expressionist. Still others offer little beyond embracing the nonsensical, like David Garland's “VCR Polka” or Lois V Virek's “Attack Cat Polka”—a song narrated by a feline antagonist.

The eclecticism of Polka from the Fringe combined with its make-no-apologies approach—manifested in a great deal of deliberately cultivated noise and dissonance—does not lend itself to easy listening. As with most avant-garde works, the album does not necessarily aim to please or sell (either commercially or specifically to a scholarly audience), but rather to provoke. Its success, then, lies primarily in audiences’ persuasion by the concept: not only that it is possible to move outside of polka traditions to a fringe, or that doing so is a worthwhile cause, but that removing the polka from its folk origins is the answer to making the genre artistic. Listeners are left with an array of evidence to consider in this pursuit. On one hand, a move to make the polka relevant at all is somewhat undermined by the circumstances of the album's production—released now more than thirty years after the songs’ original assemblage. On another, Klucevsek's eclecticism invites audiences to engage with a variety of timelessly reinvented, and maybe even art-worthy, dichotomies, including “black” and “white,” “high” and “low,” and “center” and “margins.” Regardless of whether these dichotomies or the album's avant-garde sounds are successful in making the polka art, Klucevsek does manage to pose the question, “what would happen if people took the polka a little more seriously?” The irony of Klucevsek's answers, if not the avant-garde sounds themselves, has the potential to charm listeners.