Slavko Avsenik
1929 – 2015 · Slovenia
Known for: Composer whose Avsenik Brothers Ensemble created the Oberkrainer sound
“The trumpet echo from Golica still carries across the Alps.”
Biography
Slavko Avsenik was born on 26 November 1929 in Begunje na Gorenjskem, a village below the Karawanks in Upper Carniola, the Slovenian region German speakers call Oberkrain. He never studied music formally, learned the diatonic button accordion by ear, and by his own account came into the profession in 1952 by chance. A year later he formed an ensemble with his elder brother Vilko, a trained clarinettist and arranger who could write down what Slavko played from memory. Together they fixed a line up that had not existed before: button accordion, clarinet, trumpet, guitar and baritone horn, with two singers. By 1954 the Ansambel bratov Avsenik was known across Slovenia.
The turn came with a polka he wrote in 1954 and named Na Golici, after a mountain in the Karawanks. Radio Klagenfurt played it in the Slovene hour it broadcast for Carinthia's Slovene minority, the Bavarian producer Fred Rauch heard it and signed the band, and a German version cut in 1955 as Trompetenecho swept the German speaking countries and then the rest of Europe. It is often called the most played instrumental piece in the world. As Slavko Avsenik und seine Original Oberkrainer the group signed to Telefunken-Decca in 1960 and became a fixture of German and Austrian television, playing to more than eighty thousand people in a Berlin stadium in 1961. He wrote more than a thousand pieces, polkas and waltzes built on a clear melody and a two part vocal, and the honours followed: twelve prizes from German network television, eighteen as Germany's most popular band, the European Oscar of the recording industry in 1975 and the Golden Rose of Austrian radio in 1979.
Hundreds of Alpine ensembles in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy and the Benelux adopted the instrumentation, and Cleveland style polka bands in the United States recorded more than two hundred Avsenik songs, beginning in 1958 when Johnny Pecon set English words to Tam kjer murke cveto. Avsenik toured North America in 1970 and 1985 and kept the ensemble on the road for four decades before handing the music on in his family: his son Slavko junior became a leading Slovenian film composer, his son Gregor and his grandson Sašo carried the repertoire on. A monument of three accordions around a traditional Upper Carniolan umbrella was raised near Begunje in 2013. Avsenik died on 2 July 2015 at the age of 85, and every summer since 2008 the festival bearing his name has brought ensembles back to his village.