The accordion is a free reed instrument. Press a key or button, squeeze or pull the bellows, and air passes over a thin metal tongue called a reed, which vibrates and sounds a note. Nothing strikes anything and nothing is bowed. The air does all of the work, which is why the instrument can hold a note for as long as the bellows have breath in them.
That one mechanism built an instrument that turns up in Irish pub sessions, Louisiana dance halls, Colombian festivals and Argentine tango orchestras. This guide covers where it came from, the main types you will meet, and the styles worth hearing first.
A Short History
Free reed instruments existed in Asia for centuries, in forms such as the Chinese sheng. The European line starts in the 1820s. Friedrich Buschmann built a bellows driven reed instrument in Berlin in 1822, and in 1829 Cyrill Demian of Vienna patented an instrument he named the accordion. The name came from the chords his design could sound with a single button.
What happened next was migration. The instrument was loud enough for a dance without amplification, cheap enough for a working family, and small enough to carry on a ship. Wherever people went in the second half of the nineteenth century, the accordion went with them, and it took on the local music rather than replacing it.
The Main Types
Piano Accordion
A piano style keyboard for the right hand and bass and chord buttons for the left. This is the type most people picture, it is standard in Italian liscio and much of American popular music, and the familiar keyboard makes it the usual starting point for anyone who has played piano.
Diatonic Button Accordion
Buttons instead of keys, and most notes sound one pitch when you push the bellows and a different pitch when you pull. That sounds like a limitation and works as a feature, because it pushes the player into a bouncing rhythmic style. Cajun, Norteño, Irish and Quebecois music all run on diatonic boxes.
Chromatic Button Accordion
Rows of buttons giving every note in the scale, with the same pitch in both bellows directions. The Russian bayan belongs to this family, and so does most of the classical accordion repertoire.
Concertina and Bandoneon
Related but separate. A concertina is hexagonal, the buttons sit on the ends rather than the face, and there is no separate bass side. The bandoneon, developed in Germany and adopted wholesale by Argentine tango, is the largest member of that branch and is notoriously difficult to learn.
Styles Worth Hearing First
- Cajun: single row diatonic box, fiddle alongside it, waltzes and two steps from south Louisiana.
- Zydeco: the Creole counterpart, built on blues and rhythm and blues, with a rubboard keeping time.
- Norteno and conjunto: accordion and bajo sexto from the Texas and Mexico border country.
- Vallenato: Colombian accordion music listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
- Forro: Brazilian dance music, carried to a national audience by Luiz Gonzaga.
- Tango: bandoneon rather than accordion proper, and the reason the instrument has a classical repertoire at all.
- Klezmer and Balkan: fast, ornamented, and built around modes that sit outside major and minor.
Starting Out
- Pick the type by the music you want to play. A piano accordion will not give you a convincing Cajun sound and a single row diatonic box will not get you through a liscio set.
- Buy second hand, but have the reeds checked. Reeds go out of tune and leather valves harden. A cheap box with bad reeds is not cheap.
- Learn the bellows before the notes. On this instrument the bellows are the breath and the phrasing. Players who treat them as a bus for air sound mechanical for years.
- Learn by ear from recordings. Almost none of this music was written down first.
If you want to go deeper into the regional traditions, the Smithsonian Folkways archive holds field recordings from most of the styles above.
