blow boys, blow are eight shanties for a singing accordionist. The collection consists of four deconstructed well-known shanties with bawdy, heteronormative original lyrics (e.g. What shall we do with a drunken sailor?), and four newly written shanties set to tender texts by Walt Whitman describing love between (sea)men.
Musical virtuosity meets deconstructive skew, coarse humour meets subtle sensitivity: the work explores, with a glint in the eye, what it means to desire something other than what the norm prescribes. At the same time, blow boys, blow are love songs that accordionists can sing along with – and to – their instrument.
blow, boys, blows is premiered by accordionist Andreas Borregaard on 30 October. The premiere performance takes place during the Danish DSQ Festival, and the venue is very fittingly the old wooden ferry, Gammelør, docked at the end of Christianshavn Canal.