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Bon accord
Malcolm rogers has a read of Rob Howard’s A-Z of the Accordion — and finds it pushes all the right buttons.
Accordion players can be quite fanatical.
There are whole pages on the internet devoted to famous people who play the instrument including, allegedly, Peter Gabriel, Benny Anderson (of Abba), Cindy Lauper, Snoopy, and Paul Simon.
There is also an exhaustive list of films in which an accordion can be seen or heard. These include, in case you’ve ever wondered, Il Postino, Fargo, The Godfather, So I Married An Axe Murderer, Into The West, Schindler’s List, Groundhog Day and so on for several hundred more titles.
And now there is the ultimate accordion book. To aid all you aficionados, the respected accordionist Rob Howard has come up with the definitive guide to the instrument as she is played in Britain and Ireland.
The book starts off with an explanation of where the instrument came from. Instrumentally speaking the accordion is a bit of a hybrid, with umpteen kin — among them the harmonium and mouth organ — but the original parent of all accordions, concertinas and melodeons is the sheng, a Chinese instrument which dates back to the third millennium BC.
The evolution of the modern manifestations of this ancient Chinese instrument into piano accordion, concertina and melodeon probably took place in Italy — although Germany and France also have some claims —sometime in the 18th century.
And of course in Ireland and Scotland it has long been the traditional accompaniment for generations of dancers. Rob Howard’s comprehensive section on Irish music details the lasting impact the instrument has made on the Irish tradition — and indeed has helped form the music that we know today as Irish music.
All the famous Irish artists are present and correct including Noel Hill, the famous concertina player from West Clare, the incomparable Sharon Shannon whose accordions are gone into in some detail (apparently she plays a French-made Saltarelle, an Italian Castagnari and Irish-made Cairdin model made in Rathkeale in Co. Limerick), and right beside Sharon there’s Seamus Shannon, the button accordion player from Elphin in Co. Roscommon.
As it is an A-Z I thought I’d just check up those two stumbling blocks that are the bane of any alphabetical list makers life — the letters X and Z. No problem on the Z front for the redoubtable Mr Howard. You can take your pick from zydeco music — the Black-French folk music of Louisiana related to Cajun, Caribbean and rhythm and blues — Chinese accordion player Guoping Zhang or the Bolton (?) accordionist Janusz Zukowski. Now that’s comprehensive.
Less luck with the X, sad to report — it’s Xmas presents. Still that's a small stumble in a book which covers the entire classification of the accordion world — the concertina, the button accordion and the piano accordion. There’s more difference, probably, than you might imagine. The concertina can play in any key and probably has the sweetest tone of the free-reeded instruments. It was the first accordion to come to Ireland (in the 1820s) and became particularly popular in the west of the country, for reasons which remain unclear. Apart from the beauty of its sound and its musical flexibility, its other attractions include its portability and its relative cheapness.
There are two main types of concertinas, based on their different fingering systems — rather confusingly, one is called the Anglo concertina and the other the English. The Anglo is the preferred instrument in Irish music where it is usually referred to as the German.
The button accordion — sometimes called the melodeon, although technically, or pedantically, speaking this is not quite correct — is the most commonly used form of accordion in Irish traditional music, and it is this instrument which helped change the very nature of Irish music. This came about by the instrument trying to play the same grace notes, or decorations, as the fiddle and the pipes. However, on a mechanical instrument this is not so easy and gradually many tunes were changed to accommodate the new melodies.
The instrument became popular in Ireland from the end of the 19th century as the pipes declined throughout the country. Its advantages over the pipes (whose tone and loudness it approximates to) are its portability, its cost and its relative ease of learning. The buttons on this instrument are single action — that is, it makes a different note when pushed in or out, much like the suck-blow principle of the harmonica. This gives the overall sound an attractively emphatic, rhythmic character.
The piano accordion is the image most people have of the accordion. It has a piano keyboard on one side and a row of buttons on the other which provide chords and bass accompaniment and a large part of Rob Howard's book is devoted to this instrument and its most famous exponent.
The A-Z of the Accordion is a splendidly comprehensive and readable book, and in fact the only further guidance I can give you that you won’t find in the book is to point you in the direction of the best film about accordions.
Henri by John Forte traces the surreal adventures of Henrietta Begley, a gifted accordionist from a rural Protestant backwater. She is selected to play in a Belfast music festival, and accidentally is billeted with a Catholic family in the Divis Flats. Essential viewing.
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