Revisit: Segundo Bercetche and Tomi Lebrero
The Bandoneon Returns
Argentinian musicians Segundo Bercetche and Tomi Lebrero participated in Forecast 5, in 2020, as nominees in the mentorship field Future Traditions in Music under composer and performer Du Yun. Their project evolved around the layered history of the bandoneon, a German instrument which found its way to Argentina in the nineteenth century, where it became the instrument of choice for folk musicians playing in cabarets and brothels. In the fall of 2022, two years after they conceived the project idea for Forecast, Bercetche and Lebrero released a record and traveled to the German region from which the bandoneon had originated to find out more about its history.
The duo’s initial project, Eternal Procession, sought to give new life to the traditional instrument brought to Argentina by German sailors. At the 2020 digital Forecast Forum, they premiered a film documenting their 2,000-Kilometer horseback journey through rural Argentina, in which they played with local musicians and gauchos, documenting some of the stories and myths that surround the bandoneon through songs and images. This past August, their recordings from that journey were released as an album on the label Panoptia Music.
Now, with the help of the International Coproduction Fund of the Goethe-Institut, Bercetche and Lebrero traveled to Saxony and Krefeld, where they researched the instrument’s local history and origin during a month-long stay. Their research will culminate in a series of performances in Germany, Austria, and Slovakia using bandoneon, synthesizers, and various electronics, pointing toward the instrument’s possible musical futures.