The Accordion in the 19th Century - Gorka Hermosa

INTRODUCTION
This book tries to display a general and systematic picture of the free reed
keyboard instruments and their musical and organologic developments during the 19 th
c., gathering and comparing 400 bibliographical sources in relation to the accordion and
presenting them orderly, trying to approach the subject in the most pluralist and rational
way.
All through the 19 th c., there was such an amount of different proposals for free
reed instruments that it is not easy to draw the line that separates the instruments that
were real accordions from those which were not. Nevertheless, what is certain is that we
cannot take diatonic accordions from the 19 th c. as the only predecessors of the modern
accordion. This is the reason why, when trying to analyze the history of the accordion,
we will not only analyze the history of the diatonic accordion but will also go over the
history of all the other free reed keyboard instruments existing in the 19 th c., which
could be subjected as predecessors of today’s concert accordion.
In chapter I, we will analyze the antecedents of the accordion and will vindicate
that the first known predecessor of the free reed instruments is not the tcheng. In chapter
II, we will analyze the organologic evolution of the accordion and will question that it
was invented by Demian in 1829. In chapter III we will describe the evolution of the
accordion in the 19 th c. music and will try to argue that current convertor accordions
have more similarities to the concertina or the harmonium than to the diatonic
accordions from the 19 th c. Finally, in annexes I and II, we will present a list of
Romantic works written for concertina and harmonium.
We would like to especially thank Prof. Dr. Helmut C. Jacobs, for all the
support, information and encouragement he has given us to carry out this project. We
would also like to thank all the authors quoted in the bibliography for their enormous
musicological work, and to make special mention of authors such as Pierre Monichon,
Alfred Mirek, Terry E. Miller, Pat Missin, Michel Dieterlen, Frans Van der Grijn, Joris
Verdin, Gotthard Richter, Ralf Kaupenjohann, Henri Doktorski, Rob Howard, Javier
Ramos, Beniamino Bugiolachi, Ivan Paterno, Allan W. Atlas, V.R. Zavialov… without
which The accordion in the 19 th century would not have been possible.
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