My seventies heroes didn't play the accordion. They tapped their fingers on the strings of the guitar, squeezing out a breakneck solo, and most often lived their tones transparently with grimaces on their faces.
Five pieces are not enough
However, one often cannot choose one's own story. As a self-taught high school guitarist with barely a dozen fingerpicks and a used electric guitar, I stood in the early summer of 1979 next to an accordion player in a suburb of a sleepy Bosnian kasaba. The accordionist's guitarist canceled, his cousin, and my friend, remembered that there was a guy there who was strumming something on the guitar. I couldn't refuse him when he came to my door. I knew that improvisations like this ended badly.
I remembered the Sunday morning when my friends came to my window and called me with a shout. The pioneer plant of the local football club registered for the competition, but the club forgot that the first season had started. The opposing pioneer team and the referee arrived, so the upset hosts bought pioneer volunteers from door to door. They were missing a goalkeeper. I stood on the floor and received five pieces.
A, king, A!
With a guitar in my hand in front of the Prnjavor mosque, I felt like I did back then, between the goalposts.
I imagined my first public appearance differently. In the audience, a girl with hippy loose hair in Italian jeans. I'm dusting hard rock spiked with psychedelic solos. I was greeted by rubber bands and dimies. The accordion player explained everything to me in five minutes before the dance. He says the chord, I change the chord. And everything like that. The rhythm is most often "two". "You don't mean anything - just n-ca, n-ca", he consoled me. Then he turned on the microphone taped to the accordion and began to rip circuit after circuit. Occasionally he would say to me, "Now A!" “B then F”.
About a hundred locals gathered on the widening of the macadam road near the mosque were riding in a car. It didn't take long, and the Kibicers and village Đilkos started to throw in: "Now A, Dragan!" “Now B”. Obviously, the microphone also picked up the accordionist's verbal instructions well.
Piazzolla and Bach
I returned home thoughtful. I put a record on the record player - something from hard rock, to give me hope. I had to accept the fact that the harmonica is a far more prestigious instrument among the masses than the guitar, since it serves the public's entertainment.
I almost believed that this instrument was created and made solely for these simple-minded revelers. For me, its sound has long remained a warning sign to avoid the bar or party where it was coming from. That changed when I heard what the accordion could really do. I first listened to Astor Piazzolla making a miracle out of Argentine tango on the bandoneon, an accordion with 130 tones. Then I listened to kids on the streets of German cities playing Bach on accordions that were bigger than them. The accordion was not created only for Balkan-Oriental music. But the people here have embraced her as their own for centuries.
But where did the accordion story begin?
Armenian gift to Vienna
At the beginning of the 19th century, Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy, attracted people from all over the empire. One of those who came to the city was Kirill Damian. Already his name connects him with the Čirići East. He is of Armenian origin, from a city that has been the center of Armenians in Transylvania or Erdel since the beginning of the 17th century: Romanians called the city Gerla, Hungarians Samosujvar, in Greek it was Armenopolis, Germans called it Neuschloss. Damian knows how to make pianos, and that skill is at a premium in Vienna. In 1805, he applied for a license to make pianos, which was then called a "privilege". He received that privilege in 1810. He lives and works in Vienna's most famous street, Mariahilferstraße at number 43. He enjoys the voice of a master who makes excellent pianos.
But he thinks more far-reaching. Home or concert pianos are static. He asked himself the question of how to make an instrument that would be mobile enough so that a musician could go with it among people even when they don't have the will or time to gather in places where a piano is languishing? Almost two centuries later, I load at that time the riddle that the Armenian master could have asked himself: what kind of child would be born if the piano and the bagpipes were married?
The answer was recorded in a book published in Vienna in 1830 under the title "Systematic presentation of the latest progress in craftsmanship and manufacture and their present state". There we read that Kirill Demian, master of organs and pianos, together with his sons Karl and Guido, was introduced on May 23, 1829 as the inventor of the "metal accordion" and was given a "privilege" for two years. In the description, it is stated that Damian calls his invention "Accordion". "Arias and marches, etc., can be played on it, and "even musical dilettantes" can do that "after a short practice".
Masonry piano or presser
The delight of the reviewer of the latest Viennese inventions of 1830 can be better understood if it is known that the holes existed only on the left side and that the first accordion served exclusively as an accompaniment instrument. The accordion first seduces Vienna, changes, adapts to other climates, conquers the world. Around 1856, less than four decades after the construction of the first accordion, there were 120 registered master workshops for the production of accordions in the imperial city. In the German-speaking area, the instrument was called differently. In Germany, "accordion" is a more luxurious, luxurious accordion, and "accordion" is a light and cheaper version. In Vienna it is the other way around. The accordion is the queen, and the accordion is a more modest version.
The people accepted the accordion with open arms, giving it various names: hand piano, pull-out organ, pig organ, native air compressor, press, and even a mason's piano.
In several countries, the accordion is gaining cult status. The French play it in their own, fluttering way, the Italians give it a maritime color. The Russians also remembered the depth. In 1937, the first all-evening concert with accordion compositions was held in Russia. In Argentina, accordion meets erotica - tango as a "vertical expression of a horizontal desire" is unthinkable without its sound.
Balkanization of the accordion
I had no idea what a Viennese accordion sounded like. Squealing polkas and yodeling of Alpine peoples were not my favorite musical direction. When at the beginning of the new millennium, in an old Viennese tavern, I heard Viennese old-town songs in which accordion and clarinets were lavishly "singing", I realized that I was at the source. On another occasion, I heard a girl on the street in Vienna playing Strauss waltzes on the harmonica.
However, rarely has the accordion become as popular as in the area south of the Alps. The balkanization of the accordion is a long-lasting process, but it was fully completed in the second half of the last century. Then, all around me, healthy, ruddy accordion players were stretching their instrument as if they were doing Swedish gymnastics. Narodnjak's triumphant campaign was unstoppable. They are in a motel in my Bosnian town Hind, not even three hundred meters from my entrance, on Saturdays people were blaring. I sometimes sat there with my friends - I had nowhere to go. I listened to bad accordion players, tired drummers, listless bassists and cheap singers. But the hall was always packed. In Yugoslavia, thrash found its way to people's hearts more easily than any sophisticated music.
"Dugmetara" was given a special version for music from the other side of the Adriatic in Italian workshops. The number of rows per button goes from the basic three, to a maximum of six. In folk music, especially in Serbia, anything below six is not recognized.
Tanana foreplay
What improved my impression of the accordion back then was the sound produced by Jovica Petković. Sevdah gave accordion its soul, and accordion gave sevdah modern artistry. Sometimes, listening to what my mother was listening to on the radio, I would spend some time with the "foršpil" ("prelude" in German) - the introductory part that this accordionist, born in Smederevo, and musically accomplished in Sarajevo, introduced into his genre. For decades, Jovica nurtured the most tanned Sevdalian feeling in the world on the Italian accordion Dallape. And he is, in his essence, the absolute negation of every possible turbofolk. The virtuosity of that musician reconciled me to the accordion.
The decades that have passed since that time have given me a different perspective on music. It is divided only into good and bad. And the bad is much more, in all genres. Wisdom consists in not rejecting anything in advance. Here, in Europe's south-east, as everywhere else in the world, there are people who could leave you breathless when they open the accordion and put their fingers on the holes.
With their skill, they tell humanity that it is lucky because the accordion is celebrating its official 192nd birthday. What would the world look like without her? It would be a less joyful place, that's for sure. And what would we do without that accordion, supported by an old ritual instrument, drumsticks, at the end of the best film about us - Who's singing there.
Bonus video:
