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The
Cheng
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Chinese
history books trace back to the very birth of music itself, an
event pinpointed in the Book Of Chronicles (Schu-Ching) as occurring
during the reign of the legendary "Yellow Emperor",
Huang Ti, around the year 3000 B.C. Huang's other accomplishments
included the invention of boats, money, and religious sacrifice.
He is said to have sent the noted scholar Ling Lun to the western
mountain regions of his domain to find a way to reproduce the
song of the phoenix bird. Ling returned with the cheng (or sheng),
and captured music for mankind, taking the first step toward the
genesis of the accordion.
The cheng
is in fact the first known instrument to use the free vibrating
reed principle, which is the basis of the accordion's sound
production. Shaped to resemble the phoenix, the cheng had between
13 and 24 bamboo pipes, a small gourd which acted as a resonator
box and wind chamber, and a mouthpiece. Other instruments using
a free vibrating reed were developed in ancient Egypt and Greece,
and were depicted in many beliefs.
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Reed
Instrument Development
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Virtually
unchanged after centuries of use, the cheng attracted the attention
of European musicians and craftsmen after being taken to Russia
around the year 1770. Assertions that this marked the introduction
of the free-vibrating reed principle in Europe are debatable.
Among the earlier variations on this design in the West was
the portative, which was widely heard in England during the
12th and 13th centuries. The portative consisted of a small
keyboard, bellows, and reed pipes, and was strapped onto the
player. The regal, later termed the Bible regal because of its
wide use in churches, was the next step along this line. It
had a keyboard, one or two sets of bellows, and, unlike the
accordion and other open-reed instruments, close beating oboe-like
reeds. This instrument eventually lost popularity due to a tendency
to go out of tune too easily. It was frequently used for accompanying
madrigal singers, between the 15th and 18th centuries.
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Early
Pioneers
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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 1829. 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 1822,
when a German instrument maker named Christian Friedrich Buschmann
(1775-1832) 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 1828 by leaving
Berlin and touring with it.
There
were actually many varieties of the free-vibrating reed instrument
developed during the early 1800s. Some of them are still quite
well known today. Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) was awarded
the British Patent No. 5803 for his concertina in 1829. Heinrich
Band (1821-1860) of Krefeld, Germany, invented the bandoneon
in 1840; this square-shaped instrument, played by pressing finger
buttons is popular with Argentine tango bands. That same year
Alexandre Debain finished his harmonium in Paris. In this pipeless
organ (commonly found in churches and households until the advent
of electric organs in the 1930s) air is passed to the reed blocks
via foot-operated bellows. In some early models a second person
was required to pump air into the instrument through bellows
attached to the rear of the keyboard.
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Early
Literature
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As the
renowned for accordions grew, so did a demand for instruction
manuals. The first such textbook, featuring both original music
and arrangements of familiar pieces, was written by A. Reisner
and published in Paris in 1832. Another tutorial volume, Pichenot's
Methode pour l'accordeon, appeared later that year. In 1834
Adolph Muller published his instructional book in Vienna, and
since then the music market has sustained a flood of similar
programs, with about 30 titles published during the 1860s alone.
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Further
Instrument Development
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Meanwhile,
from 1830 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. The thumb of the left hand was also placed under the
instrument to steady it, with only the second and fifth fingers
used for playing. Most players today wear double straps, although
single-strapped accordions, which leave the keyboard at a less
upright angle, are popular in the Soviet Union.
Additionally,
early accordions, like the bandoneon (and, for that matter,
the harmonica) that exists today, produced different notes on
the press and draw of the bellows. Thus, if the C key were pressed
to produce that note on the opening of the bellows, the note
D might sound when the bellows were closed. These instruments
are characterised as diatonic, and the pitch of their notes
was determined by the placement of the keys and the reeds by
each maker.
The chromatic
accordion, which produced the same note on the press and the
draw of the bellows, came into use in 1850 when an accordionist
named Walter requested that one be custom-built for him. His
model, incidentally, also featured 12 bass buttons, cleverly
arranged so that all 12 key signatures could be accommodated.
One interesting
development from this period was the appearance of what subsequently
became known as the Schrammel accordion, first used in 1877
with a quartet comprising an accordion, two violins, and bass
guitar. The Schrammel had 52 treble buttons arranged in three
rows that produced the same notes, together with 12 basses that
produced different notes, on the press and draw of the bellows.
This model was used often at Viennese gatherings and can still
be heard today, but its popularity is limited because of its
small range of notes and the difficulty with which it is mastered.
It seems
clear that at this stage the accordion was being conceived of
as a portable type of organ. Pipe organs had of course become
extremely sophisticated by then, with tones produced through
open-ended wooden or metal flue pipes of up to eight feet (for
the lowest C then in the instrument's range) in length, and
with its own free vibrating reeds set in a brass plate, to be
activated when the reed stop is engaged. This exact design was
incorporated into the accordions of that era, with several brass
or steel reeds embedded into a long wooden block in a somewhat
simplified version of the modern accordion design.
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The
Modern Accordion
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So when
the first piano accordion, or the first accordion to feature a
piano-style ivory keyboard, was produced in Vienna in 1863, many
performers regarded it as a means of liberating themselves, to
a limited extent, from being confined to their massive and immobile
walls of pipes. 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 1909, earned a reputation for himself as the father of the
American accordion playing.
During
the early part of the twentieth century the leading accordion
manufacturers began increasing their output and, thanks to pressure
from professional players, settling on a general standard size
and shape for the instrument, with 19½" the agreed
length for a 41 note keyboard. One company in particular managed
to establish a solid slot for itself in the industry hierarchy.
It is commonly accepted that Matthias Hohner (1833 - 1902) 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 1857, but by roughly 20 years after his death the business
he had founded was creating them by mass production.
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The
Global Effect
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Today the
accordion is truly an international phenomenon. There are several
manufacturers of fine accordions in the U.S., but their output
is small compared to their European counterparts. Large contemporary
producers are located in Germany, France, and the U.S.S.R.,
where the bavan, and accordion with a button keyboard, is frequently
played. 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.
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Performance
and Recent Composers
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With all
these improvements, it is no surprise that the parameters of performance
have also grown in recent years. Music for piano, celeste, harpsichord,
harmonium, and organ may now be played on the free bass accordion
without having to alter a note of the score, thanks to the greater
freedom allowed for the left hand. And there is a substantial
repertoire of works specifically written for accordion by such
composers as Tchaikovsky, Berg, Paul Creston, Henry Cowell, Walter
Riegger, Alan Hovhaness, Tito Guidotti, Lukas Foss, James Nightingale,
William Schimmel, Ole Schmidt, Tjorborn Lundquist, Hugo Hermann,
Richard Rodney, Bennett Douglas Ward, Wolfgang Jacobi, Nicolas
Tchaikin, and many others. New works are also frequently commissioned
by the American Accordionists'
Association, the Accordion Teachers Guild, and other organisations.
Colleges
and universities in the U.S. now accept music students majoring
in accordion, a fact that reflects the instrument's unquestioned
legitimacy in classical music. It has been seen on the concert
platform at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Albert and
Festival Halls in England, and has appeared as the featured
solo instrument with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Pops
Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New Zealand Symphony
Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London.
The accordion
has also made inroads into the field of popular music. The Beatles,
Billy Joel, Neil Diamond, the Rolling Stones, Emerson, Lake
& Palmer, Jimmy Webb, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and a host
of other artists have used the accordion on records and onstage,
while it has proven itself as ideal for soloing and for blending
in well with the clarinet, the saxophone, and the flute in jazz
settings too. The jazz world has seen such notable accordionists
as Art Van Damme, Mat Matthews, Tommy Gumina, Leon Sash, Ernie
Felice, Angelo di Pippo, and Jack Emblow.
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