(Fr. concertina; Ger. Konzertina; It. piccola fisarmonica) [squeezebox].
A bellows-blown, hexagonal- or octagonal-shaped, Free reed instrument, with buttons parallel to the bellows on both sides (thus different in appearance from the accordion, which is rectangular and has its buttons or keys perpendicular to the bellows. For an illustration of the free reed of a concertina see Reed, fig.3c). Three different types cut across two national traditions.
Also known as ‘Wheatstone English’ concertina. The term ‘English’ refers both to national origins and to a specific type within the English tradition; ‘Wheatstone’ designates the inventor and leading manufacturer. The English concertina was developed by the physicist sir charles Wheatstone (1802–75) in the late 1820s in response to widespread interest in free-reed instruments. The earliest sketches for it appear in Wheatstone’s 1829 patent for another free-reed instrument, his slightly earlier symphonion (invented about 1825), which was a mouth-blown, harmonica-like instrument with buttons on its sides. Thus the concertina was an offshoot of the symphonion, its bellows replacing the latter’s blowing mechanism.
The Wheatstone English concertina is a fully chromatic instrument on which a single button produces one pitch regardless of the direction of the bellows, with a range – for the treble concertina – of g to either c'''' (48 buttons) or g'''' (56 buttons). Tenor, baritone and bass concertinas have the same compass starting from c, G and C respectively. (There is also a treble-tenor, which combines the ranges of those two, and an almost toy-like piccolo.)
The
layout of the buttons is ingenious.Fig.1 shows a
48-button treble: all notes on lines of the staff appear in the left hand,
those in the spaces in the right; the two vertical rows in the centre give the
notes of C major, the outer rows, the sharps and flats; the duplication between
e
/d
and a/g is a relic of the instrument’s
early mean-tone tuning, which began to give way in about 1860 (after drawing
criticism from Berlioz in the second edition of his Grand traité
d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1855), where, however, he
praised the concertina’s timbre).
With the beginning of commercial production by Wheatstone & Co. in the early 1830s, the English concertina quickly found a home in upper- and middle-class drawing-rooms; the Wheatstone sales ledgers, preserved with the Wayne Collection of Concertinas at the Horniman Museum, London (formerly at Belper, Derby), contain the names of many titled buyers. The repertory consisted largely of arrangements of opera highlights and other popular songs of the day. On the concert stage, the instrument's breakthrough came in 1834, when Giulio Regondi, the leading concertina virtuoso of the period (and a well-known guitarist), first performed in Ireland, and followed that up with the instrument's first gaudy success at the 1837 Birmingham Music Festival. For much of the remainder of the century, both Regondi and Richard Blagrove (see Blagrove) kept the instrument in the spotlight, even forming a well-received concertina quartet in 1844.
The concertina’s rising popularity was matched by its growing repertory: an 1860 catalogue issued by the London publisher J.J. Ewer lists almost 450 items for the instrument. Most of these works, which range from easy-to-play arrangements for amateurs to original, virtuoso show-stoppers, were written by concertinists themselves, most notably Regondi and Blagrove. In addition, during the 1850s and 60s a number of ‘mainstream’ composers contributed to the repertory; John Barnett, Julius Benedict, George Macfarren, Bernhard Molique and (in the 1870s) Edouard Silas provided the concertina with concertos, sonatas, chamber works and rather lovely character pieces. Exx.1 and 2 provide an idea of the expressive and technical range found in these works. While Barnett's work shows the lyric, singing quality of which the English concertina was capable, Regondi's demonstrates its virtuoso capabilities: thick (finger-knotting) chords, rapid single-note passages and quasi-contrapuntal combinations of the two.
By the closing decades of the century, the concertina’s career as a ‘serious’ instrument was on the wane, a victim both of lukewarm critical reception (George Bernard Shaw, who had nothing but praise for the instrument, was a notable exception) and of socio-economic circumstances: with the advent of mass-produced concertinas introduced in the 1860s by Louis Lachenal & Co., which had the effect of making cheaper instruments readily available, the concertina was coming to be associated mainly with the ‘folk’, both urban (on street corners and in music halls) and rural (in the Morris dance revival). Its changed status was evident everywhere: in the concertina bands of the northern industrial towns (for which there were annual competitions); in the ways in which Charles Ives (Orchestral Set no.2, third movement, 1915–c1929) and Percy Grainger (Shepherd’s Hey, 1908–13, and Scotch Strathspey and Reel, 1901–11) used the instrument; and even in fiction, where the concertina fell in social stature from the hands of the villainous, but highly cultivated Count Fosco, who renders Rossini on it in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), to those of the ‘ne'er-do-well’ Bob Hewitt in George Gissing's The Nether World (1889) and the drunken, unlicensed dentist who plays ‘lugubrious airs’ in Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899 – set as an opera, with the concertina sound produced by a synthesizer, by William Bolcom in 1992). Even in these more humble settings, the English concertina was challenged by two other types: the ‘Anglo’ and the ‘duet’.
Only since the 1980s has the English concertina enjoyed a small revival in art-music circles, with more than a dozen pieces exploiting the instrument's full potential: among them, Rien Snoeren's Baroque-like Tempesta for unaccompanied concertina, Alla Borzova's jazz-influenced Pinsk and Blue for concertina and piano, and Alistair Anderson's On Cheviot Hills, for concertina and string quartet, with its evocation of the folk music of Northumbria.
The
Anglo (‘Anglo-continental’ or ‘Anglo-German’) concertina is the British
adaptation of the square-shaped, diatonic, German Konzertina (‘Chemnitz’
concertina) developed by Carl Friedrich Uhlig in the mid-1830s (and depicted in
John Everett Millais’s painting The Blind Girl; 1856, Birmingham City
Museum and Art Gallery). Here each button produces two pitches, one as the
bellows are pulled out, another when they are pushed in. On a basic 20-button
Anglo concertina the buttons are arranged in two rows on each side, each of
five buttons. The two rows are tuned a 5th apart (e.g. C/G, G/D or, more
rarely, B/F), with the
only ‘chromatic’ note allowing for secondary dominants. A 30-button Anglo has
an extra row of buttons on each side, providing a range of accidentals and
other useful notes (fig.2). Concertinas are sometimes custom-made,
and Anglo players may commission instruments with 40 or more buttons, arranged
according to their requirements to provide a wider range of chromatics and
‘alternative positions’ for some of the diatonic notes for increased
flexibility. Sometimes a ‘drone’ button may be added, which plays the key note
on both the push and the pull.
Having arrived in England around the middle of the century, the Anglo first gained favour among street musicians. Later it came to be favoured by folk music performers (particularly in the south of England and in Ireland); indeed, it was an Anglo concertina player, William Kimber of the Headington Morris dancers (Oxfordshire), who helped bring about the revival of English folk music and Morris dancing at the beginning of the 20th century. The Anglo has gained currency in some popular music of South Africa, where it has the nickname ‘squashbox’.
Ironically, the original German Konzertina on which the Anglo was modelled eventually enjoyed its greatest success in North and South America: in the polka bands of the mid-western United States, and – with modifications and a change of name to Bandoneon (after Heinrich Band who developed the instrument in the 1840s) – in the tango orchestras of Argentina. The bandoneon also figures in the works of Gordon Mumma, David Tudor and Astor Piazzolla, who, as he redefined the nature of the tango, raised the technical and expressive potential of the bandoneon to new heights.
The duet concertina was first described by Wheatstone (who called it the ‘double’ after its ability to play melody and accompaniment) in a patent of 1844. Like the English concertina, it is fully chromatic. Three features set it apart from both English and Anglo concertinas: it has a large range, which could vary from three-and-a-half to five octaves (C–c'''') depending upon the number of buttons (up to 81); the buttons are laid out so that the right and left hands are each entirely self-sufficient and take treble and bass registers respectively, with about a one-octave overlap; it is therefore possible to play melody and accompaniment on the duet concertina in a piano-like fashion. The duet concertina was adopted particularly in the British music hall, where Alexander Prince (d 1928) and Perci Honri (Percy Thompson, 1874–1953) played their transcriptions of Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser and Sullivan’s ballad The Lost Chord, and in the Salvation Army, which even developed its own version of the instrument.
Lately there has been renewed interest in the concertina. Festivals in both England and the United States draw hundreds of players; the journal Concertina & Squeezebox provided a lively forum from 1983 to 1996, while the International Concertina Association Newsletter continues to appear on a quarterly basis, the Free-Reed Journal as an annual; and a small number of British manufacturers have revived the art of making first-class instruments (of all three types). Although most of the activity has been folk-music related, the English-system concertina has attracted the attention of a number of art–music composers, while a few performers and scholars have turned to the instrument’s Victorian concert and salon tradition, shedding light on its development and recreating its music on period instruments.
W. Cawdell: A Short Account of the English Concertina (London, 1865)
P.A. Scholes, ed.: The Mirror of Music 1844–1944: a Century of Musical Life in Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the ‘Musical Times’ (London, 1947)
B. Bowers: Sir Charles Wheatstone, FRS, 1802–1875 (London, 1975)
Concertina & Squeezebox (1983–96)
O.W. Heatwole: The English Concertina and an Introduction to Music (Washington DC, 1974)
M. Dunkel: Bandonion und Konzertina: ein Beitrag zur Darstellung des Instrumententyps (Munich, 1987)
G.O. OhAllmhuráin: The Concertina in the Traditional Music of Clare (diss., Queen's U. of Belfast, 1990)
N. Wayne: ‘The Wheatstone English Concertina’, GSJ, xliv (1991), 117–49
D. Rogers: ‘Giulio Regondi: Guitarist, Concertinist or Melophonist? A Reconaissance’,Guitar Review, xci (1992), 1–9; xcii (1993), 14–21; xciii (1994), 11–17
S. Eydmann: ‘The Concertina as an Emblem of the Folk Music Revival in the British Isles’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, iv (1995), 41–50
A.W. Atlas: The Wheatstone English Concertina in Victorian England (Oxford, 1996)
W. Wakker, ed.: Music for the English Concertina (Helmond, 1998–)
Free-Reed Journal (1999–)
A.W. Atlas: ‘The “Respectable” Concertina’, ML, lxxx (1999), 241–53
M. Dunkel: Akkordeon – Bandonion – Concentina im Kontext der Harmonikainstrumente (Bochum, 1999)
Portrait of a Concertina, perf. D. Townsend, Saydisc CD-SDL 351 (1985)
The English Concertina, various pfmrs, coll. R. Carlin, Smithsonian Cassette Series 08845 (1992) [incl. notes by R. Carlin]
The Irish Concertina, perf. N. Hill, Shanachie 79073 (1992)
Plain Capers: Morris Dance Tunes from the Cotswolds, perf. J. Kirkpatrick, Topic TSCD 458 (1992)
The Great Regondi, perf. D. Rogers, Bridge BCD9039/9055 (1993–4)
Concertina Landscape, perf. D. Townsend, Serpent Press CD-SER 006 (1998)
On Cheviot Hills, perf. Alistair Anderson, Lindsay Quartet, White Meadow Records WMR 2002CD
Absolutely Classic: the Music of William Kimber, perf. W. Kimber, J. Kirkpatrick, J. Graham, English Folk Dance and Song Society, EFDSS CD 03 (1999)
ALLAN W. ATLAS