@AccordionBruce @catsalad
Someone's gotta post a picture of a Somali pirate with an accordion.

@davidr @AccordionBruce @catsalad Concertinas are still 1835 ish. Now, I haven't found anything on the variations of the nearly 4,000-year-old Chinese version. https://concertinamusic.com/timeline/

@Jeanniewarner @davidr @AccordionBruce @catsalad

Yes, the concertina was the invention of Sir Charles Wheatstone, patented 1829, public launch 1835, so Tom the cabin boy couldn't have used one to play the Trumpet Hornpipe for Captain Pugwash[1] on The Black Pig. 3:O(> There were lots of competing designs, so as with computers: "Any student of the concertina has to choose between ten incompatible operating systems."[2] 3:O))>

[1] Pugwash is coeval with this moose!

[2] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-concertina-celebrating-sir-charles-wheatstones-invention-at-kings

@AccordionBruce

🤯
Despite your username, I had to look this up and it's true. Absolutely wild.

@catsalad

@AccordionBruce @catsalad I've got a theory here: accordions, like opsin genes, were invented at least twice, separately. When the golden age of piracy was gone, the memories of accordions were repressed since strongly associated with socially unaccepted piracy-related aggression and violence. Hence, no trace in later history. However, they re-appear in movies as a great example of an archetype in Jungian shared unconsciousness. Anyone recall other social groups playing accordions? I'd like to develop my theory further.

@adam_wysokinski @catsalad
The Jungian telegraph needs to be included at least

Developed by the same guy as the English concertina, Charles Wheatstone

He also measured the speed of light, did that circuit thing, and invented 3-D glasses ‍

@AccordionBruce @catsalad It fucks me up knowing that the bodhrán was invented in the 19th century, cus it feels like something that must have been around forever.

Granted it does depend on who you ask, there are people who insist it's ancient, but I think it's a question of how rigorously you define it. Like frame drums are probably older than dirt, but we're talking about a specific type of frame drum.

@Owlor @catsalad
I have to leave the history of the bodhrán to others

It’s too tempting to grab the story that it only got popular after Seán O Riada gave it a name on TV in the 60s

@Theosoreass @AccordionBruce @catsalad noone would believe that the hurdy gurdy was a real instrument

@AccordionBruce @catsalad Neal Stephenson made a similar mistake in the Baroque Cycle: a character is killed by being stabbed with the endpin of a cello. Aside from the fact that this wouldn't be very effective structurally (the endpin is not robustly attached), the endpin didn't *exist* before the mid1800s (prior to that, the cello was held tightly between the legs, as the viola da gamba is today). A musician friend of mine wrote to Stephenson about this, (politely) pointing out the error. He told me that he received a reply, which read: "AAAARGH!"

@ProcessParsnip @catsalad
It’s featured near the beginning of my #AccordionRevolution book

@AccordionBruce @catsalad The accordion displaced the bagpipes (in their many variants) across Europe, pushing them to the margins - mountain valleys (Appenines, Pyrenees) on the mainland or islands (Sardinia, Ireland. Scotland).

@AccordionBruce @catsalad I thought the things pirates don't play were concertinas.

@Owlor @catsalad
There’s a cool video history series on YouTube by a fantastic player though

@sellathechemist @catsalad
Alan Lomax went to Europe in the 1950s to escape the McCarthy era

And he seems to have come back with a deep hatred of the Accordion

He called it a “pestiferous instrument”

And seemed to apply a generic filter based on the fact that it had chased around fiddle and bagpipe traditions in many parts of Europe

Not unearned. But not helpful

@Owlor @catsalad
The origin-stories of traditions are some of my favourite things

Like ~every~ tradition has to have been started by real live people just sitting around one day

The accordion is particularly interesting because it gained real global popularity after the 1860s or so

And recording started in the 1890s

So we have records of people who might have known the very first players of some “traditional” styles

@Owlor @catsalad
Folk glorious of the 1800s and early 1900s hated the squeezeboxes

So they never talked about them or recorded them or interviewed any of the players

So folklorists can’t do something similar to a comparative analysis of today’s research on the impact of the boombox 100 years later

Mostly it makes you conscious of the question of the historical origins of “authenticity” and how it was used as a sales-pitch, or simply nostalgic amnesia

@Cadbury_Moose @davidr @AccordionBruce @catsalad Thought you might enjoy reading about the Chinese one from an earlier millennium.

@Jeanniewarner @Cadbury_Moose @davidr @catsalad
You’re right!

Outside my areas but seems like the great Pirate Queen Zheng Yi Sao might have had South East Asian free reeds (variants inspired early accordions) onboard

And they would likely/definitely have been around on shore

Now that’s a story to be told! 🪗 ‍️
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_Sao

Tell me some thing blasphemous and/or sacrilegious