When was the accordion made

For keyboard accordions, the left hand provides continuo bass notes and chords , while the right adds melody and additional accompaniment. Most modern accordions also have leather or plastic flaps over the air slots to prevent loss of pressure. Register knobs and tabs on the outside move slides to engage or close additional ranks of reeds; these may be marked by a code of two horizontal lines with a dot signifying normal pitch or octave displacement, depending on its position.

Single-action Single-action instruments include the melodeon and the British chromatic accordion. Each melody button controls a pair of reeds usually adjacent notes of a scale , so a scale can be accomplished with only four buttons C, E, G on the press and D, F, A, B on the draw. This is the original action of the earliest accordions and is similar to that of mouth-blown harmonicas.

Double action instruments such as the piano accordion and the Continental chromatic accordion favor music with a more complex, sweeping character, as each pair of reeds gives the same note, regardless of the way the bellows move. Shortly after clockmaker Matthias Hohner established his harmonica and accordion firm in , he shipped some to American relatives.

Hohner pioneered the use of machine-punched reed covers and mass-produced wooden combs. Harmonicas free-reed adaptations of the accordion reed plate system became popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

President Abraham Lincoln carried a harmonica in his pocket, and the instrument was played by Civil War soldiers and by frontiersmen such as Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. Hohner also produced steel reeds for accordions and helped to champion uniform tone through push-action bellows.

Handy recalled hearing train imitations played on the harmonica and accordion in the s, and the Hohner Marine Band diatonic in multiple keys became one of the defining sounds of early blues style. By the s, the accordion and harmonica industry produced more than 50 million instruments a year. A music school for accordion teachers was established in Trossingen, Germany, in ; it became an official state academy in under the principalship of Hugo Herrmann , whose collection Sieben neue Spielmusiken was the first important musical composition for the solo accordion.

The British College of Accordionists was founded in and provides a syllabus of accordion examinations still used today. American design innovations have made the instrument more versatile: Reeds were usually riveted, bolted, or screwed in place, but All-American models from the s were held in place by tension.

The U. Wood and metal were in short supply due to military demand, so Finn Magnus , a Dutch-American entrepreneur, developed molded-plastic versions.

Bates and Arne B. The Bates archive contains more than 1, instruments and 2, pieces of trade literature and ephemera, including antique sheet music. A cultural history of the accordion in America Urbana: Illinois, examine the history of free-reed instruments.

Angelo Paul Ramunni of the New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company Accordion Stories from the Heart , and Rob Howard Vintage accordions : a pictorial history of the accordion , have published lavishly illustrated histories of the European accordion, and the Metropolitan Museum presented an exhibit on 19th-century free-reed instruments in Gallery from to Receive weekly email updates and news from EMA and the early music community.

Sign Me Up! A diatonic button accordion by the Berlin maker J. A rosewood French accordion from the s Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Similar instruments appear in late Meiji-period Japanese prints ss and postcards ss featuring young girls and professional geishas with French accordions MFA: As with the modern accordion, these keys were much smaller than those on the piano, and more rounded to allow for faster playing.

Design requests from musicians helped refine the shape and appearance of the accordion keyboard even more over the next several years. One of these artists, Pietro Deiro, brought his custom built piano accordion to the United States and, thanks to a successful New York concert at the Washington Square Theatre in , earned a reputation for himself as the father of the American accordion playing. One company in particular managed to establish a solid slot for itself in the industry hierarchy.

It is commonly accepted that Matthias Hohner - was to the accordion what Henry Ford was to the automobile and enterprising figure who made his product available to a great number of people at reasonable prices. Originally a clockmaker in Trossingen, Germany, Hohner had begun building accordions at his workshop in , but by roughly 20 years after his death the business he had founded was creating them by mass production. The Global Effect Today the accordion is truly an international phenomenon.

There are several manufacturers of fine accordions in the U. Large contemporary producers are located in Germany, France, and the U. But by far the most voluminous companies are in Italy. About 75 percent of the instruments built there are exported around the world; one firm, Scandali, a subsidiary of Farfisa, does an especially good business with the Soviet Union. In China the instrument is being built in large numbers there too, with two large manufacturers.

Early Pioneers Cyrillus Damian, a Viennese instrument maker, has often been credited with the creation of the first true accordion. He was, in fact, the first to patent an instrument of that name, having received royal patronage for his invention in Damian's design featured two to four bass keys that produced chords within a range of an octave. But the first true accordion made its appearance in , when a German instrument maker named Christian Friedrich Buschmann put some expanding bellows onto a small portable keyboard, with free vibrating reeds inside the instrument itself.

He dubbed it the hand-aeoline, and helped spread its fame in by leaving Berlin and touring with it. Further Instrument Development Meanwhile, from onwards, the development of the accordion continued at an accelerating pace. Still, there were some important differences between the instruments of that era and those of today. For one, early accordions did not have shoulder straps that allowed the player to hold the instrument close to the body.

The older models were played by placing the thumb, the little finger, and sometimes the fourth finger of the right hand under the treble keyboard, leaving only the remaining two or three fingers free to press the keys. Its popularity grew and it became widespread throughout Europe, thanks to the simplicity of the sounds it produces, its ease of carrying and the ability to play a melody and, at the same time, create a rhythmic-harmonic structure.

It functions very much the same way as other instruments in its category, but one of the main features of the melodeon is that it does not have reeds that produce the sound of accidental notes sharps and flats. The accordion was first introduced in Japan in by Sensuke Asahi, who donated one to the Shinto shrine, Miho Jinja in the Shimane prefecture.

Some decades later, Tanabe began manufacturing accordions. The piano accordion differs from that with a chromatic button system by the fact that the right side of the instrument is equipped with a keyboard having black and white keys similar to those on a piano or an organ. The history of the accordion in Castelfidardo started in , thanks to the extraordinary wits of the young Paolo Soprani, the founder of the first accordion factory in Italy.

In that year, in a country house in Castelfidardo, in the stunning valley of the river Musone, an Austrian pilgrim on the way back from nearby Loreto asked for shelter.

In , he opened a workshop in the basement of the same country house with the help of his brothers, Settimio and Pasquale.

He then hired some workers and moved to a neighbouring house. The first harmonicas were sold in the fairs and markets of neighbouring towns, especially in Loreto, directly by Paolo, who abandoned the family business and opened the first factory right in Castelfidardo.