The Accordion in the Americas

Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More!

Helena Simonett, Helena Simonett

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780252094323
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

An invention of the Industrial Revolution, the accordion provided the less affluent with an inexpensive, loud, portable, and durable "one-man-orchestra" capable of producing melody, harmony, and bass all at once. Imported from Europe into the Americas, the accordion with its distinctive sound became a part of the aural landscape for millions of people but proved to be divisive: while the accordion formed an integral part of working-class musical expression, bourgeois commentators often derided it as vulgar and tasteless.

This rich collection considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the exotic-sounding South American bandoneon and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, contributors illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

Contributors are María Susana Azzi, Egberto Bermúdez, Mark DeWitt, Joshua Horowitz, Sydney Hutchinson, Marion Jacobson, James P. Leary, Megwen Loveless, Richard March, Cathy Ragland, Helena Simonett, Jared Snyder, Janet L. Sturman, and Christine F. Zinni.

1

From Old World to New Shores

HELENA SIMONETT

In his article on immigrant, folk, and regional American musics, Philip Bohlman engages the accordion for commenting on territorial transgressions. The instrument’s popular appeal, he holds, was mainly due to its “adaptability and its ability to respond to a wide range of musical demands in the changing cultural contexts” of the New World.¹ Despite its malleability, the accordion remained an emblematic immigrant instrument, a symbol of the working-class people, throughout the twentieth century. Yet the accordion has challenged and transgressed its social associations many times during its relatively short history of nearly two hundred years. During the first decades after its invention in the early 1800s, the accordion was an upper- and middle-class instrument: its buyers were young, urban, affluent, ambitious, fashion conscious, and future oriented—in short, early nineteenth-century “yuppies.” Each instrument was meticulously handcrafted, which made the early accordion costlier than a guitar and put it out of reach for the common people. The finest materials were used—polished ebony wood for the frame and delicate kidskin for the bellows. Labor-intense filigree carvings and spangles, inlay, rhinestone, and ivory work decorated these luxury models, created in a process involving hundreds of hours of labor. This first essay briefly traces the history of the accordion from its humble beginnings in the early 1800s to its meteoric rise and consolidation as a truly global instrument.

Although the Viennese organ and piano manufacturer Cyrill Demian was the first to have his new invention patented (1829), numerous other European inventers were cooking up their own versions of free-reed instruments at the same time. Demian’s accordion, “a little box with bellows [and] five keys, each able to produce a chord”²—hence its name—topped an invention frenzy among instrument makers, but it inspired rather than stopped their creative zeal. Once an instrument circulated, it was subject to a restless continuation of improvements. In fact, the accordion was itself a continuation and a perfection of many late eighteenth-century experiments with free-reed aerophones: in 1770, a Bavarian musician performed in St. Petersburg, Russia, on a “sweet Chinese organ”—most likely a Chinese sheng. The sheng is an ancient free-reed instrument that consists of a wooden mouthpiece attached to a gourd equipped with bamboo pipes of varying lengths. It is believed that the early European attempts to create bellows-driven instruments based on the free-reed principle—tongues that are vibrated by an airflow—were derived from the sheng. In 1779, a portable free-reed organ called the Orchestrion had been developed in St. Petersburg, based on ideas for a talking machine developed by an acoustics professor in Denmark. The invention of the Pys-harmonika (Vienna, 1821) and the Äoline (Bavaria, 1822) followed. A Viennese music-box maker patented his “Harmonika in Chinese manner” in 1825, calling himself a “Certified Music Box- and Mouth-Harmonica-Maker.”³

European countries in the nineteenth century were closely connected through travel and trade. It is no surprise, then, that Demian’s accordion appeared in Paris the year after its invention. The patent protected his invention until 1834, but not in a foreign country. Thus, Parisian instrument makers immediately copied the novelty. Six years later, there were twenty accordion and harmonica makers registered in Paris. With some modifications of the Viennese model, they tried to appeal to the sophisticated Parisian ears.⁴ M. Busson in Paris added a piano keyboard for the right hand, a novelty that became known as accordéon-orgue, flûtina, or harmoniflûte. With its casework made in rosewood and inlays of ivory and mother-of-pearl, it was geared “towards the ladies of the better society and advanced to a desired bourgeois object of female distraction.”⁵ Unencumbered by gender expectations, the novel instrument was indeed considered suitable for young women. Busson’s new invention was shown at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1855. The popularity of the accordion continually increased as the number of published method books, some printed in two or even three languages (German, French, and English), indicates. “It was the accordion’s uniform tone, considered novel at the time, and its breadth of nuance-rich music, as well as its portability and affordability, that endeared it to large populations.”⁶ The flourishing French accordion production came to a halt during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), after which Italian manufacturers from Stradella pushed onto the market.

The luxurious artisanal Stradella model was one of the two main Italian accordion types to succeed.⁷ In the early decades of the accordion’s conquest, the instrument found its way into two music-loving towns: Stradella in the northern Italian province of Pavia, a region that at the time was under the power of the Austrian Empire, and Castelfidardo, located in the province of Ancona (Marche region) in central-eastern Italy. The latter town, marked by its old castle and surrounding walls, was the place where in 1860 a decisive battle between the Piedmontese troops and the papal army laid the groundwork for Italy’s unification. Immediately after the annexation of the Marche region, “we witness the birth of the first accordions and concertinas which were probably introduced to the Italians by French troops allied to the Papal State. These instruments were soon adapted to suit Italian taste.”⁸

Italians, their ears accustomed to the sound of the bagpipe (zampogna), a popular instrument found from Sicily to the Lombardy, quickly embraced the new instrument that allowed playing sustained notes resembling bagpipe drones and generated a similar jarring sound as the traditional double-reeded zampogna. The later nineteenth century saw the accordion gain unprecedented popularity: according to the director of Castelfidardo’s accordion museum, Beniamino Bugiolacchi, Giuseppe Verdi put forward a proposal to the Italian conservatory for the study of the instrument in his role as president of the ministerial commission for the reform of musical conservatories during the 1870s.⁹ Accordion workshops sprang up all over Italy to appease the population’s craving for the new instrument. But like elsewhere around the turn of the century, the separation of leisure activities along class lines, aggravated by unremitting urbanization and modernization, had increased, and “the joyous sound of the accordion, exalted by the gaiety of country outings and barnyard dancing, soon end[ed] up hoarsened in the outdoor settings of a geography neglected by other more ancient and illustrious instruments.”¹⁰ The bagpipe’s modern rival was eventually delegated to the peasantry. The instrument, with its “decidedly vulgar sound,” void of any “noble phonic aspirations,”¹¹ nevertheless later served a fascist regime in its populist politics. Bugiolacchi writes, “[T]he propaganda of the time spoke of the accordion as a musical instrument invented in Italy, and as being ‘the pride of our industriousness and delight of the Italian people.’ . . . In 1941 Benito Mussolini ordered that a quantity of 1,000 accordions be distributed to the various troops fighting in the Second World War.”¹²

The accordion had a similar meteoric career in northern Europe. Six weeks after Demian filed a patent for his accordion in Vienna, the Londoner Charles Wheatstone filed a patent for an invention he called “symphonium,” an aerophone with a keyboard layout and bellows. This instrument served as the prototype for Wheatstone’s concertina—“a hexagonal double-action, forty-eight key instrument”¹³—a patent for which he would eventually file in 1844. Because of the close musical relationship between Vienna and London at the time, it is likely that Wheatstone knew of Demian’s experiments. His early concertina models combined “the twenty-four-key fingering system of the symphonium with the exposed pearl pallets and wooden levers of Demian’s first accordion.”¹⁴ Neil Wayne suspects that Wheatstone’s concertina models were first intended for his lectures on acoustics at the King’s College in London, where he was a professor of experimental physics, and not for commercial sale. Wheatstone had also a scientific interest in Oriental free-reed instruments (the Chinese sheng, the Japanese shô, and Javanese musical instruments) and the jew’s harps and German mouth harmonicas (mouth organs) that had already been circulating for several years. In 1821, Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann (Berlin) constructed a small mouth-blown device with fifteen reeds as an aid for tuning, which he continued to improve.¹⁵ A year later, Buschmann had added hand-operated bellows, valves, and fitting buttons. This became his Hand-Äoline, or Konzertina.

Like a host of others with similar experimental inclinations, Wheatstone created a number of new and improved musical instruments, including the “foot-powered concertina,” “wind piano,” “bellows-fiddle,” and free-reed pitch devices. He was also working on typewriters, electromagnetic clocks, artificial voice devices, and the electric telegraph, for which he later would gain fame.¹⁶ Most of Wheatstone’s musical inventions seemed rather preposterous, much like “the multitude of attempts of all kinds daily made by instrument-makers, and their pretended inventions, more or less disastrous, . . . the futile specimens which they seek to introduce amidst the race of instruments.”¹⁷ This critique was expressed by an open-minded and extremely progressive composer for his time, Héctor Berlioz. The French composer liked to explore new tone colors in his orchestrations and made use of the (Wheatstone English) concertina, whose sound he found “at once penetrating and soft . . . it allies itself well with the quality of tone of the harp, and with that of the pianoforte.”¹⁸ However, he criticized the concertina’s mean-tempered tuning—“conforming to the doctrine of the acousticians,—a doctrine entirely contrary to the practice of musicians”¹⁹—which prevented it from being useful in combination with any well-tempered instrument.²⁰

Despite this limitation, the concertina quickly rose in popularity as prominent Victorian concertinists began to perform virtuoso solo works, concertos, and chamber music. Benevolent reviews from respected critics—such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw’s comment that “the concertina has now been brought to so great perfection . . . [it] can perform the most difficult violin, oboe, and flute music”²¹—helped its reception among the affluent. Indeed, the main purchasers of the concertina into the 1870s were members of the aristocracy, male and female alike. Once exclusively at home on the concert stage and in the upper-class salon, the concertina was gradually adopted by the English working class and thus was eventually abandoned by the “serious” musicians of the Victorian era. Maybe that was the incentive for this widely known joke: “What is the definition of a gentleman? Somebody who knows how to play the accordion but refrains from doing so!”

The trend toward an increasing proletarization of music making in the second half of the nineteenth century was ...