The accordion is a portable box-shaped musical instrument of the hand-held bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist.

It is played by compressing or expanding a bellows whilst pressing buttons or keys, causing valves, called pallets, to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel, called reeds, that vibrate to produce sound inside the body.

The instrument is sometimes considered a one-man-band as it needs no accompanying instrument. The performer normally plays the melody on buttons or keys on the right-hand manual, and the accompaniment — consisting of bass and pre-set chord buttons — on the left-hand manual.

The accordion is often used in folk music in Europe, North America and South America. It is commonly associated with busking. Some popular music acts also make use of the instrument. Additionally, the accordion is sometimes used in both solo and orchestra performances of classical music.

The oldest name for this group of instruments is actually harmonika, from the Greek harmonikos, meaning harmonic, musical. Today, native versions of the name accordion are more common. These names are a reference to the type of accordion patented by Cyrill Demian, which concerned “automatically coupled chords on the bass side”.

The accordion's basic form is believed to have been invented in Berlin in 1822 by Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, although one instrument has been recently discovered that appears to have been built in 1816 or earlier by Friedrich Lohner of Nürnberg in the German State of Bavaria.

The accordion is one of several European inventions of the early 19th century that used free reeds driven by a bellows. An instrument called accordion was first patented in 1829 by Cyrill Damian, of Armenian descent, in Vienna .

Demian's instrument bore little resemblance to modern instruments. It only had a left hand buttonboard, with the right hand simply operating the bellows. One key feature for which Demian sought the patent was the sounding of an entire chord by depressing one key. His instrument also could sound two different chords with the same key; one for each bellows direction (a bisonoric action).

At that time in Vienna, mouth harmonicas with Kanzellen (chambers) had already been available for many years, along with bigger instruments driven by hand bellows. The diatonic key arrangement was also already in use on mouth-blown instruments. Demian's patent thus covered an accompanying instrument: an accordion played with the left hand, opposite to the way that contemporary chromatic hand harmonicas were played, small and light enough for travelers to take with them and used to accompany singing. The patent also described instruments with both bass and treble sections, although Demian preferred the bass-only instrument owing to its cost and weight advantages.

The first pages in Adolph Müller's accordion book.The musician Adolph Müller described a great variety of instruments in his 1833 book, Schule für Accordion. At the time, Vienna and London had a close musical relationship, with musicians often performing in both cities in the same year, so it is possible that Wheatstone was aware of this type of instrument and may have used them to put his key-arrangement ideas into practice.

Jeune's flutina resembles Wheatstone's concertina in internal construction and tone color, but it appears to complement Demian's accordion functionally. The flutina is a one-sided bisonoric melody-only instrument whose keys are operated with the right hand while the bellows is operated with the left. When the two instruments are combined, the result is quite similar to diatonic button accordions still manufactured today.

Further innovations followed and continue to the present. Various buttonboard and keyboard systems have been developed, as well as voicings (the combination of multiple tones at different octaves), with mechanisms to switch between different voices during performance, and different methods of internal construction to improve tone, stability and durability.

The accordion appeared in popular music from the 1900s-1960s. This half century is often called the "Golden Age of the Accordion." Three players: Pietro Frosini, and the two brothers Count Guido Deiro and Pietro Deiro were major influences at this time.

Most Vaudeville theaters closed during the Great Depression, but accordionists during 1930s-1950s taught and performed for radio. During the 1950s through the 1980s the accordion received great exposure on television with performances by Myron Floren on the Lawrence Welk Show. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the accordion declined in popularity.

In popular music, it is now generally considered exotic and old-fashioned to include the accordion, especially in music for advertisements. Some popular acts do use the instrument in their distinctive sounds. See the list of popular music acts that incorporate the accordion. In 1993, during their MTV Unplugged performance performance, Nirvana's Krist Novoselic used accordion while covering The Vaselines song Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.

The New York band They Might Be Giants extensively use the accordion in many of their recordings, especially on earlier albums such as Apollo 18 (album).

Perhaps the most famous accordionist in popular music is "Weird Al" Yankovic, who has used the accordion in every album he has recorded, most extensively on his debut album.

Another great example would be the Irish-American band Flogging Molly. The group consists of 7 members, one of which being an accordionist (Matt Hensley).

Additionally, the Canadian indie-rock group Arcade Fire uses accordion in much of their music. It can distinctly be heard in the tracks "Neighborhood #2 Laika", "Wake up", and "No Cars Go" among many others. The former two can be found on the album entitled "Funeral" and the Latter on "Neon Bible".

Dr. Steel uses accordion in many of his songs, such as "Lullabye Bye" and "Bogeyman Boogie." Tom Waits used an accordion in his video for the song "Downtown Train" in 1985. On a Raffi concert video called "Raffi on Broadway", Connie Lebeau played this accordion in "De Colores" and a Raffi song called "Will I Ever Grow Up". Polka Floyd injects accordion into Pink Floyd music.

Use in classical music

Main article: Accordion music genres#Use in classical music

Although best known as a folk instrument, it has grown in popularity among classical composers. The earliest surviving concert piece is Thême varié très brillant pour accordéon methode Reisner, written in 1836 by Miss Louise Reisner of Paris. Other composers, including the Russian Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Italian Umberto Giordano, and the American Charles Ives (1915), wrote works for the diatonic button accordion.

The first composer to write specifically for the chromatic accordion was Paul Hindemith. In 1922, the Austrian Alban Berg included an accordion in Wozzeck, Op. 7. Other notable composers have written for the accordion during the first half of the 20th century American composer William P. Perry featured the accordion in his orchestral suite "Six Title Themes in Search of a Movie" (2008). The avant experimental composer Howard Skempton began his musical career as an accordionist, and has written numerous solo works for it.

Brazil

The accordion is a traditional instrument in Brazil. Used in the style known as bai?o in the northeast. Luiz Gonzaga is known as the king of bai?o.

Use in heavy metal music

Accordionists in heavy metal make their most extensive appearances in the folk metal sub-genre, and are otherwise generally rare. Full-time accordionists in folk metal seem even rarer, but they are still utilized for studio work, as flexible keyboardists are usually more accessible for live performances.

Notably, the Finnish symphonic folk-metal band Turisas has always had a full-time accordionist, employing classical and polka-style sensibilities alongside a violinist. Another Finnish metal band, Korpiklaani, invokes a type of Finnish polka called humppa, and also has a full-time accordionist. Sarah Kiener, the former hurdy-gurdy player for the Swiss melodic-death/folk metal band Eluveitie, played a Helvetic accordion known as a zuger?rgeli, which could be a distant relative (in one way or another) to the Swiss schwyzer?rgeli, as both are indigenous to and very rare outside of Switzerland.

The lead vocalist for the pirate metal band Alestorm plays a keytar and often uses it to make accordion sounds.

The best accordions are always fully hand-made, especially in the aspect of reeds; completely hand-made reeds have a far better tonal quality than even the best automatically-manufactured reeds. Some accordions have been modified by individuals striving to bring a more pure sound out of low-end instruments, such as the ones improved by Yutaka Usui, a Japanese-born craftsman.

The manufacture of an accordion is only a partly automated process. In a sense, all accordions are handmade, since there is always some hand assembly of the small parts required. The general process involves making the individual parts, assembling the subsections, assembling the entire instrument, and final decorating and packaging.

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