Here’s the joke. A guy leaves his accordion in the back seat of the car while he’s shopping and returns to find the window smashed.
“So someone stole the accordion?”
“No, they left another one.”
I rarely volunteer that I play the accordion. I’m not ashamed, exactly, but I’ve heard the joke enough. I do think it’s funny, partly because no one ever guesses that I have an accordion in the car. They see a rectangular suitcase and ask if I’m traveling. Accordion players don’t leave their instrument lying around visible and unprotected.
After the joke, people ask me why I would want to play the accordion. The short answer is that it’s a portable keyboard. Playing the piano, I have always envied musicians who could pick up and carry their instrument. In the nineteenth century, the accordion spread around the world as a piano and organ substitute. Missionaries who left Europe for the hinterlands wanted music to accompany singing in church, and immigrants carried them for entertainment.
Fifteen years ago, on a trip to Cuba, I attended a Festival of Caribbean Music. Staying with us at the Hotel Leningrado in Santiago were members of musical groups from unfamiliar islands. We hung out by the pool drinking rum with Tanny and the Boys, a group of seasoned black musicians from St. Maarten who played banjo, guitar, accordion, and more exotic instruments. A press release on their fiftieth anniversary in 2009 described their sound as “meringue, salsa, soca, blues and bolero, among other types of music.” They opened my ears to the possibilities.
I was attracted to the piano accordion because I could already play the right-hand keyboard. I only had to learn the buttons for the left hand. The original accordions had buttons on both sides of the instrument and no keys, like the ones used today by Cajun and Norteño players. Their accordions are bisonoric: the same button plays one note when the bellows move in and a different note when they move out. A smaller example of a button-only concertina is the bandoneón of tango music, where players squeeze the bellows between their hands. In contrast to the button accordion players, there are keyboard tourists who treat my instrument like a short piano for the right hand, ignoring the buttons entirely. Needless to say, I am not that kind of girl.
We don’t blow into accordions, so they are not “wind instruments,” but the sound is created by air moving through reeds in the bellows. The great advantage of air power is that it can bend notes the way the human voice does. On the piano, the hammer hits the string, the note sounds, and that’s it. The sound will only decay, unless I play the note again. No wailing. On the accordion, I can play a note and open the bellows so that it grows. I have left-hand buttons that play single bass notes, but I also have buttons that play a combination of reeds for an entire chord: major, minor, seventh, diminished. I can make sounds like a bagpipe or violin. Until the advent of the electronic synthesizer, the accordion was the instrument that approximated its versatility.
My younger son gave me my first accordion for Christmas about ten years ago. Before I fainted from shock at the expensive gift (they cost hundreds of dollars even when hard-used), he confessed that it was on long-term loan from the mother of a friend. When my children were teenagers, they used to complain about my practicing on the piano, and I would threaten, “Wait until I retire. Then I plan to take up the accordion.” This one called my bluff, big time, well before retirement. I took the instrument out of the case twice—once for a photograph on Christmas Day, and then to show it off a few weeks later to my piano teacher, who also owned an accordion. He explained to me how to strap it on. Then I put it away. As the years passed, I felt guilty about keeping someone else’s property and tried to return it, but the owner didn’t want it.
Finally, one fall, my piano teacher mentioned that he had his first accordion student. Although I hadn’t retired, I was close. Maybe this was the time. I brought my accordion to the next lesson and bought Book 1 of the Palmer-Hughes Accordion Course. Anyone old enough to remember the Dick and Jane readers can imagine the assortment of folk tunes and patriotic standards the books feature, illustrated with old-timey drawings. They are a time capsule from the Fifties, the Lawrence Welk years. I hadn’t heard “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” since elementary school. And who could forget “The Marine Corps Hymn”? Not as many polkas as I expected, frankly. My peak accordion experience so far is playing “La Vie en Rose,” but that sheet music came from another source. I like the course (I’m in Book 4 now) because each piece teaches a specific skill, but I go online to supplement the selection.
Last year, I attended the annual Accordion Festival in Cotati, California, specifically to buy a better, ideally lighter-weight accordion. The booths set up by sellers from Seattle and Vancouver offered a greater selection of models than our local store. I ended up again with a full-sized 120-button instrument (they come with as few as 48 buttons). My “new” rebuilt Italian accordion weighs twenty pounds on the luggage scale, almost twenty-five with the case, and is no lighter than the other one. I wanted the greater range of notes and the mellow sound, but I’ve had to buy a back strap and build up to longer practice sessions. I haven’t carried twenty pounds on my chest since my last child fit in a Snuggli thirty years ago.
At some point, I may trade down to a dinkier squeezebox. If I end up alone and feeble in assisted living, I still want an accordion to hold.
Toni Martin is a physician and writer who lives in Berkeley.
