Accordion

• 1. Introduction

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  The accordion takes its name from a 19th-century German word, Akkordeon, rooted in Akkord, meaning a musical chord or a concord of sounds. Inside its pleated bellows, air rushes past strips of brass or steel called reeds, and those reeds vibrate to make sound. It is a box-shaped instrument of the free-reed aerophone family, and it carries melody on one hand and accompaniment on the other. A person who plays it is called an accordionist. But how did a portable squeezebox become the heartbeat of music in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, China, and a Kenyan tribal dance all at once? What made one Vienna patent in 1829 ripple outward into vallenato, forro, klezmer, jazz, and even symphonic concert halls? The answers begin with a question of basic mechanics: how does pressing one key make a whole chord ring out, and why does that single trick still shape the instrument's name today.

• 2. How It Breathes

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  The bellows is the most recognizable part of the accordion, and it does something no other part can. The player compresses or expands it while pressing buttons or keys, opening pallets that let air flow across the reeds. One comparison likens the bellows to a violin bow drawn across strings. A more direct comparison is breathing for a singer, because all expression flows through this single mechanism. The keyboard touch is not expressive at all and does not affect dynamics.

  Applied pressure increases the volume, and skilled players coax a surprising vocabulary from that pressure. There are swells and fades. There is the bellows shake, a rapid series of short changes in direction, popularized by Renato Borghetti in gaucho music and by Luiz Gonzaga, and used so heavily in Forro that Brazilians named it resfulego. There is constant motion that produces clear tones with no resonance. There is the silent air button, which lets the bellows produce only the whooshing sound of moving air, a trick reached for in contemporary compositions.

  Valves sit on opposing reeds of each note so the reeds can sound louder without air leaking from each reed block. The body itself is two boxes, usually wooden, joined by the bellows and housing the reed chambers. Each side has grilles to move air in and out and to let the sound project, and the right-hand grille is usually larger and often shaped for decoration. The instrument is an aerophone, so its keyboard mechanisms simply enable or disable that flow of air.

• 3. One Key, A Whole Chord

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  Cyrill Demian patented an instrument called the accordion in Vienna in 1829, and it bore little resemblance to modern ones. It had only a left-hand buttonboard, with the right hand simply working the bellows. The feature Demian sought to protect was the sounding of an entire chord by depressing one key. His instrument could even sound two different chords with the same key, one for each bellows direction, an action called bisonoric.

  Vienna at that time already had mouth harmonicas with chambers, called Kanzellen, plus bigger instruments driven by hand bellows, and the diatonic key arrangement was already in use on mouth-blown instruments. What Demian's patent really covered was an accompanying instrument, played with the left hand, small and light enough for travelers to carry and use to accompany singing. His patent described instruments with both bass and treble sections, but he preferred the bass-only version for its lower cost and weight.

  The basic form of the instrument is believed to have been invented in Berlin in 1822 by Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, though one instrument discovered in 2006 appears to have been built earlier. The chord-coupling idea Demian patented gave the modern instrument its name. The oldest name for this whole group of instruments was harmonika, from a Greek word meaning harmonic or musical. Today the native versions of the word accordion are more common, and they all point back to Demian's automatically coupled chords on the bass side.

• 4. Crossing The Channel

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  The accordion reached Britain around 1828, introduced from Germany. The Times noted it in 1831 as something new to British audiences and did not review it favorably, yet it soon became popular anyway. By the mid-1840s it had also caught on with New Yorkers.

  Charles Wheatstone, an English inventor, took a decisive step that Demian had not. After Demian, other accordions had appeared, some with only a right-handed melody keyboard. It fell to Wheatstone to bring both chords and keyboard together in one squeezebox. His 1844 patent for what he called a concertina also let players tune the reeds from the outside with a simple tool.

  Adolf Muller, an Austrian musician, described a wide variety of these instruments in his 1854 book Schule fur Accordion. Vienna and London had a close musical relationship at the time, with musicians often performing in both cities in the same year, so Wheatstone may well have known of these instruments. Jeune's flutina sat alongside this story too. It resembled Wheatstone's concertina in internal construction and tone, yet functionally complemented Demian's accordion, being a one-sided bisonoric melody-only instrument. Combine the two, and you get something close to the diatonic button accordions still manufactured today.

• 5. The Russian Boom

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  In Tula, Russia, around 1830, two masters named Ivan Sizov and Timofey Vorontsov began making simple accordions after receiving an early one from Germany. The earliest history of the accordion in Russia is poorly documented, but Russian researchers credit these makers with the first known examples. The growth that followed was staggering.

  By the late 1840s the instrument was already very widespread, and together the two masters' factories were turning out 10,000 instruments a year. By 1866, Tula and neighboring villages were producing over 50,000 instruments yearly, and by 1874 yearly production passed 700,000. By the 1860s, the Novgorod, Vyatka, and Saratov governorates also had significant production. By the 1880s, the list had grown to include Oryol, Ryazan, Moscow, Tver, Vologda, Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod, and Simbirsk, and many of these places developed their own varieties of the instrument. That regional invention would eventually feed into a Russian chromatic variant called the bayan.

• 6. A Thousand Configurations

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  Piano accordions and button accordions split the instrument's world right down its right-hand side. Piano accordions use a piano-style keyboard. Button accordions use a buttonboard, and are further divided by whether that buttonboard is chromatic or diatonic. The choice matters, because what is easy on one type can be challenging or impossible on another, and skill with one layout may not transfer to another.

  Chromatic button accordions, and the Russian bayan, arrange notes chromatically across two major systems known as the B-system and the C-system. The virtuoso Pietro Frosini even used a chromatic accordion with a decorative right-hand keyboard added beside the buttons. Diatonic button accordions are built around the notes of diatonic scales in a few keys, often one row per key, and the word diatonic also describes bisonoric instruments whose keys sound two notes depending on bellows direction. That family includes the Argentinian bandoneon, the Slovenian-Austro-German Steirische Harmonika, the Czech Heligonka, the Italian organetto, the Swiss Schwyzerorgeli, and the Anglo concertina.

  The left hand has its own systems. The Stradella bass system, also called standard bass, arranges single bass buttons in a circle of fifths plus rows of preset major, minor, dominant seventh, and diminished chords. The Belgian bass system reverses that circle of fifths and adds three rows of basses, but was rarely used outside Belgium. Free-bass systems arrange notes chromatically for greater access to melodies and complex basslines, and converter-bass models can switch between free-bass and Stradella. Luttbeg double-keyboard piano accordions even put a piano layout on both sides, which let pianists like Duke Ellington double on the instrument without difficulty.

  Size is never standardized. Piano accordions may carry as few as 8 bass buttons or up to 140 and beyond. White keys range from 14 inches across on a child's accordion to 19 inches on an adult instrument. The most common bass layout is 120 buttons, with large free-bass converter models reaching 160. In 2021 a patent was published by Valerio Chiovarelli for a bass system whose chord buttons produce two-note chords instead of three, aimed at jazz.

• 7. Reeds, Switches, And The Price

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  Inside the accordion sit the reeds that generate its tones, organized into sounding banks that combine into registers producing different timbres. All but the smaller accordions have switches that control which reed banks operate, arranged from high to low registers, and many registers differ in octave or in how octaves are combined. All but the smaller models usually have treble switches, and the larger, more expensive ones often add bass switches.

  The first factor in describing or pricing an accordion is size, expressed as a number of keys on each side, such as 37 over 96, meaning 37 treble keys and 96 bass keys. After size, price and weight depend mostly on the number of reed ranks on each side, whether they sit in a cassotto, and the number of register combinations. The next factor is reed quality. The highest grade is called a mano, meaning hand-made, the next is tipo a mano, meaning like hand-made, and lower grades include export and others. Costly woods, luxury decorations, a palm switch, a grille mute, and electronics all raise the price further. The most expensive accordions are typically fully hand-made, especially the reeds, because completely hand-made reeds have a better tonal quality than even the best automatically manufactured ones.

  The craft survives in specific places. The Italian cities of Stradella and Castelfidardo are notable centers, with many small and medium manufacturers especially at the latter, and Castelfidardo honors the memory of Paolo Soprani, one of the first large-scale producers. A company has built accordions in the French town of Tulle since 1919 and is now the last complete-process maker in France. Hohner still makes its top-end models in Germany, and Weltmeister instruments are still handmade by HARMONA Akkordeon GmbH in Klingenthal. In the 2010s, electronic and digital accordions arrived, using sound modules and MIDI to offer hundreds of sounds, headphone practice, and effects like a sustain pedal and portamento that no acoustic instrument has.

• 8. The World's Instrument

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  China has more accordionists than any other country in the world, and possibly more than every other country combined. The instrument was introduced there in 1926 and rose through the years thanks to Russian teachers and its place as a popular instrument in the People's Liberation Army. In 1984, the Ministry of Culture invited the American virtuoso Robert Davine to present master classes and broaden the national accordion program. In North Korea, the accordion is known as the people's instrument, and all teachers there were expected to learn it.

  The instrument's reach mapped the waves of European migration. In Colombia it anchors vallenato and cumbia, and every April the country holds the Vallenato Legend Festival in a competition for the best player, the world's largest competitive accordion festival, where once a decade the King of Kings contest awards the Pilonera Mayor prize. In Mexico, norteno leans heavily on the accordion, and Ramon Ayala is known there as the King of the Accordion. In Brazil it is the official symbol instrument of Rio Grande do Sul, voted in by unanimity in the deputy chamber, and during its boom the country held around 65 accordion factories, 52 of them in the south. Luiz Gonzaga, the King of the Baiao, made it the principal instrument of Forro, typically in a trio with triangle and zabumba.

  In the United States it runs through Tejano, Cajun and Creole music, zydeco, klezmer, and polka. From the 1900s to the 1960s, a stretch often called the golden age of the accordion, players like Pietro Frosini, the brothers Guido and Pietro Deiro, and Charles Magnante shaped popular music. After most vaudeville theaters closed during the Great Depression, accordionists taught and performed on radio, among them the concert virtuoso John Serry Sr. Myron Floren brought the instrument to television on The Lawrence Welk Show, before rock and roll pushed it into decline in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  Classical music kept reaching for it too. The earliest surviving concert piece is Theme varie tres brillant pour accordeon, written in 1836 by Louise Reisner of Paris. Paul Hindemith was the first composer to write specifically for the chromatic accordion, Alban Berg included one in Wozzeck in 1922, and the first accordion concerto was composed in Russia in 1937. The instrument even reached a Kenyan tribe, the Kikuyu, where it became the main instrument in the traditional Mwomboko dance. In 2005, the Finnish composer Veli Kujala developed a quarter-tone accordion with the Italian manufacturer Pigini, dividing each of five octaves into 24 quarter tones, a sign that the squeezebox is still being reinvented.