How Composer’s Soft Spot Landed Accordion a Key Role

“Use an accordion, go to jail--it’s the law!”

While this bumper-sticker slogan reflects the modest esteem in which the accordion is generally held, composer Gina Leishman has sufficient self-confidence to embrace it as her favorite among the many instruments she plays.

“Well, it is a much-maligned instrument,” Leishman said in her clipped British accent. “But it’s one I adore. A friend of mine made me a T-shirt with a whole array of accordions on the front and the ‘Use an accordion, go to jail’ saying printed on the back.”

Leishman is putting the finishing touches on her musical score for Peter Barnes’ comedy “Red Noses,” which opens Aug. 6 at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. Her fondness for the accordion has inspired her to give it a prominent role in Barnes’ commedia dell’arte opus about a troupe of actors roaming 14th-Century Europe during the Black Plague.

“The leading character is a nun, and I’m going to have her play the accordion,” Leishman said. “Although she will start with the psaltery (a medieval stringed instrument), she gets to play the accordion--and very well, too.”

Leishman explained that Barnes’ “Red Noses” is not just a period piece.

“Even though it’s set in late medieval times, at the drop of a hat a character may break into a Music Hall song Barnes has written into the script, songs such as ‘Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries’ and ‘When You’re Smiling,’ ” she said. “Barnes has a great knack for jumping period and changing styles. We call it ‘turning on the sixpence.’ You call it ‘turning on a dime.’

“And what is true of the writing will also be true of the music,” she said. “In some places I have the styles overlapping: While a plainsong chant is going on, somebody breaks into a Frank Sinatra crooning type of song.”

Leishman’s composing studio is littered with instruments that prove her schizophrenic approach to the score. On one side of the room, banks of electronic keyboards--samplers and synthesizers--climb to the ceiling, while the other side is littered with mandolins, North African drums, a Greek bouzouki, a Turkish medieval bombarde, bells and other assorted folk instruments.

While the keyboards and accordion are her own instruments, she was lucky to find the owner of a folk instrument museum in Claremont, east of Los Angeles, who was willing to lend her the collection of unusual instruments she needed. Leishman and two other musicians will form the pit band for “Red Noses,” but she has recorded some electronic sounds to give certain parts of the play what she describes as an “apocalyptic sonic edge.”

Barnes’ play seems tailor-made for someone with a musical background as eclectic as Leishman’s. Though she majored in medieval music at Edinburgh University, where she wrote a scholarly thesis on music at the 15th-Century court of Philip the Good, most of her musical exploits in America have leaned to jazz and avant-garde theater.

She spent four years in Oregon playing with an all-woman jazz trio, and earlier this year the Bay Area Jazz Composers Orchestra premiered two of her most recent compositions. Over the last five years, she has worked with the Flying Karamazov Brothers.

“They taught me to juggle, and I taught them music,” she said of the group, which she described as a troupe that uses juggling as a pretext for flights of verbal imagination.

“The first thing we did together was ‘Comedy of Errors’ at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 1982, where I played Luciano and was one of the musicians in the band. It was during that production we decided to call the troupe’s band the Kamikaze Ground Crew.”

Leishman has acted in a number of dramatic productions, although she usually gets offbeat roles. “I’m no Ophelia,” she said, laughing.

She collaborated with the Flying Karamazov Brothers as both actress and musician in an expanded version of Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” in 1986 for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. It was this Stravinsky production that she was planning to reprise in Seattle when the San Diego Rep offered her a chance to work on the Barnes piece.

“The play has only been done by London’s Royal Shakespeare Company--it took them seven years to do such an epic piece--and then done in Chicago. The Rep wanted an original score for their production. If the other ‘Red Noses’ did have music, I’ve not heard it.”

According to Leishman, “Red Noses” is a parable.

“Many have said that the late 20th and the 14th Century are two very similar periods of history. Both have experienced the breakdown of norms and traditions. There is also the feeling of the end of an era, that the world is going through a cataclysmic change. It’s an exciting, although not necessarily pleasant, time.”

While Leishman makes her home in San Francisco, she has not renounced her British roots. She makes a yearly pilgrimage to the north of England, where her parents live in retirement.

“My father, who is a Scot, was in the diplomatic service, although my mother is from America,” she said. “They have been very supportive of my musical career. I think they secretly get vicarious thrills from the life I live.”