Squeeze This! A Cultural History of the Accordion in America

Squeeze This! A Cultural History of the Accordion in America. By MarionJacobson.(Urbana,Chicago,andSpringfield:University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 256, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 cloth.)Squeeze This! is an ethnographic look at the piano accordion in nineteenth and twentieth-century North American culture. Jacobson, an accordion player with a background in old-timey and klezmer music, begins her study with the nineteenth-century invention of the piano accordion, and the instrument's subsequent entry into the United States as an established element within the cultures of several ethnic immigrant groups, particularly Italians, in an immigration pattern that included established accordion makers along with artists. She documents decorative and mechanical changes made in the instrument by those Italian-born American accordion makers and coordinates these changes with musical and cultural changes as the instrument was absorbed into various popular contexts of American culture, including vaudeville, jazz, and folk and traditional musics. She ends with the current revival as the piano accordion is adding its voice to all popular musical idioms including rock 'n' roll and classical music.Loosely defined, all accordions, including concertinas, are two boxes full of free reeds with an intermediary bellows holding the two ends together. Differences between instruments have to do with the number of reeds, the tunings of those reeds, keys vs. buttons, the plane of the keys/buttons, and bellows action (or how many tones are available whether the bellows are being pulled apart or pushed together). The piano accordion is visually identifiable by the piano keyboard on the right-hand side of what looks like a box with a bellows in its middle; the left-hand side is a system of chords accessible through buttons. The piano accordion's keyboard distinguishes it from the button accordion, its smaller, slightly older sibling so visible in many folk traditions, including Irish, Quebecois, Cajun, Conjunto, polka, and other ethnic musics. The button accordion is primarily diatonic and has limited harmonic capabilities , characteristics which, while they do not preclude a musician's development of virtuosity within a traditional folk music idiom, do limit the instrument's ability to work within popular and classical music traditions that require full chromaticisms and harmonies. The piano accordion's mechanical design creates a fully chromatic melodic instrument that is capable of melodic chromaticisms as well as complex diatonic and chromatic harmonies needed for the composition and performance of both popular and classical musics. Although Jacobson touches on accordions in folk traditions, her focus is on the piano accordion in popular musical contexts, a focus that is consistent with the instrument's use in this country.Squeeze This! presents sound ethnomusicological scholarship based on first hand musical knowledge and performance experience as well as field and scholarly research. Jacobson's contribution to the ethnography of musical instruments in general and of the piano accordion in particular is her portrayal of the processes by which an instrument enters and is assimilated into a culture. …

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