CONCERTINA
Copyright © 2006 Shlomo Pestcoe. All rights reserved.
The concertina is a small accordion-like free-reed instrument that comes in a variety of styles and systems. Unlike accordions, concertinas have no chord buttons-- just individual note buttons on both sides of the instruments.
The instrument's history begins with the English concertina, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone around 1830, a fully chromatic, bellows-powered instrument with a fingering system based on Wheatstone's 24-button, mouth-blown Symphonium, patented in 1829. By 1846, the English concertina had assumed its current "standard" form with 48 buttons and hexagonal sides.
In 1834, C.F. Uhlig of Chemnitz, Germany developed the Chemnitzer Konzertina or German concertina, a square-sided instrument that operates on a diatonic "push-pull" system, similar to that of the button accordion. The Chemnitzer Konzertina came to America with the Germans, Poles and other immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. It's still very popular in the Mid-West, where it's primarily associated with polka music.
English concertina maker
George Jones
modified the German diatonic system and placed it in an English hexagonal body to create the
Anglo-German concertina in the early 1850s. Cheaper and easier to play than the English
concertina, the Anglo became the concertina of the "common folk," played by everyone from
sailors to farm hands. Nowadays, the Anglo is the favored concertina for traditional Irish and
English folk dance music, while the English concertina, always considered to be more of a
middle-class "parlor" instrument, is also being used for traditional music, thanks to the '60s Folk
Revival.
In South Africa at the end of the 19th century, cheap Anglo-German concertinas imported from Germany and Italy were picked up by black miners, who retuned the instruments to play traditional tribal scales and dubbed them "squashboxes." Eventually the squashbox became an important instrument in the evolution of Zulu and Sotho pop music.
Another major type of concertina is the
Bandoneon-- first marketed in 1850 by Heinrich Band (1821-60), a leading music
merchant in Krefeld, Germany-- a further development
of the German system. Today, the Bandoneon is mostly associated with Argentinean tango and Uruguayan
popular dance music.
--Shlomo Pestcoe
- Anglo-German Concertina. Ambrotype. Location unknown, c. late 1850s. This is one of the earliest photographs of an "Anglo" concertina. (Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
- Bandoneon with two violins. Real photo postcard. Montevideo, Uruguay, c.
late 1920s. (Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
