The accordion is a portable free-reed instrument in which the player pumps a pleated bellows to push air across metal reeds, choosing notes with keys or buttons on two sides. A patent granted in Vienna in 1829 is usually cited as its starting point, though similar instruments were being built at about the same time. It spread through migration and trade into dance, song and concert traditions on nearly every continent.
Patents, rivals and a crowded decade
Historians generally agree that the accordion belongs to a burst of free-reed invention in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Reed organs, mouth organs and early bellows instruments were all being built, in part because Europeans had become curious about the Chinese sheng, a free-reed mouth organ known there since the eighteenth century. In Vienna, Anton Haeckel built a keyboard free-reed instrument, the physharmonika, around 1818, and in Berlin Friedrich Buschmann produced another kind of free-reed instrument in the early 1820s.
The date most often cited for the accordion itself is 1829, when Cyrill Demian, an organ and piano maker in Vienna, received a patent. The name reflects a feature of his design, the Akkord, a chord sounded by pressing a single button. Because several inventors overlapped, it is fairer to call Demian’s patent an early landmark than a single moment of invention. Makers in Paris, Belgium and later Italy then reshaped the instrument in the following decades.
Two boxes joined by folded air
An accordion is built from two wooden reed cases connected by a bellows, a pleated, airtight chamber of cardboard and cloth with metal reinforcing the corners. The right-hand case holds the melody keyboard and the left-hand case holds the bass and chord buttons. Inside each, hundreds of small steel reeds are fastened over slots in reed blocks. The tongues are commonly steel, mounted on plates of brass, zinc or aluminum.
Each reed is a thin tongue fixed at one end. Air from the bellows makes the free end swing through its slot, and a pallet, a small hinged valve, opens only when its key or button is pressed. Thin leather or plastic flaps stop air from leaking through the reeds that are not meant to sound. A separate air button lets the player open or close the bellows silently between phrases.
Breathing in both directions
Because reeds respond to air moving either way, an accordion can sound while the bellows opens or closes, which is how it manages long, unbroken phrases. On a piano accordion, the same key or button gives the same pitch whether the bellows is pushed or pulled. Many diatonic instruments, by contrast, give different notes on each direction of travel, a feature that shapes their traditional dance repertoire and playing style.
Dynamics come from the left arm. Quick, light bellows pressure gives a gentle tone, and a firm push produces loud, biting chords. Because the pitch of a free reed depends on the reed itself, not on the player’s breath, the pitch stays largely steady from soft to loud. Some makers pair two or three reeds per note, with one deliberately tuned slightly off, to create the beating, slightly wavering sound associated with musette playing.
Registers, banks of reeds and color
Range depends on the model. A full-size piano accordion commonly has forty-one treble keys, a little over three octaves, and a bass side of one hundred twenty buttons. Smaller instruments have fewer of both, and a museum’s Soprani piano accordion from around 1930 has a forty-eight-button bass. Chromatic button models arrange the right hand differently, and some offer a wider span than the piano layout.
Several banks of reeds sit at different octaves, and small switches, called registers or couplers, select which banks sound. One professional instrument in a London museum lists nine registrations with names such as oboe, clarinet, violin, organ and piccolo. The names suggest other instruments, but the sound itself always comes from reeds, so the labels are a way of describing color rather than a reproduction of the instruments they name.
Left hand as band, right hand as voice
Playing the accordion divides the work between hands. The right hand plays the melody and the left keeps the bellows moving while pressing the bass and chord buttons without looking. A college collection dates the piano-style keyboard to 1859, and it is often easier for players who already know a keyboard, while button systems can offer compact fingering and a wide range.
On a standard 120-bass instrument, the buttons follow the Stradella layout. Each row is arranged so that neighboring buttons are a fifth apart, which keeps the most common chords close together. Some rows give single bass notes and others give major, minor and seventh chords, letting one finger supply the harmony that a pianist would build with three. Some instruments also offer a free bass layout for playing independent lines.
Keys, buttons and everything between
Piano accordions, with a piano-style keyboard on the right, are widespread. Diatonic button accordions give a limited set of notes, with fingering and bellows direction tied closely to the key. Chromatic button accordions put all twelve notes of the octave under the fingers in rows of buttons, and several arrangements of those buttons exist, including systems common in France, Italy and eastern Europe.
Related instruments include the concertina and the bandoneon, which use bellows and free reeds but with button boards on both ends and no keyboard. Electronic accordions can reproduce the sound of reeds through sampling. Regional tunings, bass layouts and reed arrangements also differ, which is why an instrument built for one tradition can feel unfamiliar to players from another.
The instrument that migrated
A college collection describes the accordion as inexpensive, portable and useful to migrants seeking to keep home traditions alive. It travelled with European emigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became central to genres such as Cajun, zydeco, norteño and tango in the Americas, and to merengue in the Dominican Republic. In each place local players changed its tuning, repertoire and technique.
In Europe the accordion sits at the heart of dance halls, village festivals and street music, from French musette to central European folk styles. It also has a concert life: conservatories teach it, composers write solo and chamber music for it, and it joins Harmonica, Banjo and guitar ensembles in popular and traditional bands. A school for accordion teachers opened in Trossingen, Germany, in 1931.
Keeping the bellows airtight
An accordion’s greatest enemies are heat, damp and dryness. Very humid air can swell wood and corrode steel reeds, while very dry air can shrink the wood and loosen the wax that holds the reeds. Players store instruments in cases, with the bellows closed and strapped, and avoid leaving them in cars, near radiators or in direct sun.
Leaking bellows, sticking pallets and reeds that have drifted out of tune all show up as changes in sound or response. Fixing them involves opening the reed cases and working on small parts, which is done by trained technicians. Players usually limit their own care to keeping the exterior clean and the keys or buttons free of dust, and to moving the bellows gently rather than forcing it.
Small facts worth knowing
- The name comes from the German Akkord, meaning chord, reflecting the single-button chords in the 1829 patent.
- In the Italian town of Castelfidardo, accordion production reached about 51,000 instruments in 1938 and dropped to about 500 by 1944, according to a regional cultural exhibit.
- One college collection dates the piano-style keyboard to 1859, decades after the first patents.
- Charles Wheatstone patented the English concertina in London in 1844, some fifteen years after Demian’s Viennese patent.
Terms used in this entry
- bellows
- A folding chamber that the player squeezes and draws out to move air through the reeds.
- coupler
- A switch that selects which banks of reeds sound.
- diatonic
- Limited to the notes of a particular scale, without a full set of sharps and flats.
- free bass
- A left-hand system that offers single notes across a wide range instead of ready-made chords.
- free reed
- A thin metal tongue that swings back and forth through a slot in a plate, sounding as air passes over it.
- musette tuning
- A setup with slightly mismatched reeds for each note, producing a shimmering, pulsing tone.
- pallet
- A small hinged valve that opens when a key or button is pressed, letting air reach a reed.
- reed block
- A plate or block, often of wood and metal, in which a set of reeds is mounted.
- Stradella bass
- The standard button layout of the left hand, arranged in fifths, with rows of single notes and chord buttons.
References
- Grinnell College Libraries. accordion · Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection. omeka-s.grinnell.edu/s/MusicalInstruments/item/2384
- Grinnell College Libraries. button accordion · Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection. omeka-s.grinnell.edu/s/MusicalInstruments/item/2387
- Early Music America. According The Accordion Its Historical Due. earlymusicamerica.org/?p=76640
- Google Arts & Culture (Unioncamere). The Accordions of Castelfidardo. artsandculture.google.com/story/the-accordions-of-castelfidardo-unioncamere/CgVhQIkSRxwA8A?hl=en
- St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh. Piano accordion (Soprani, c. 1930). collections.ed.ac.uk/stcecilias/record/96041
- Horniman Museum and Gardens. accordion. horniman.ac.uk/object/2008.605.1
Sources were consulted for facts and context; the text is original. See Sources and Methodology.
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