A melodeon or diatonic button accordion is a member of the free-reed aerophone family of musical instruments. It is a type of button accordion on which the melody-side keyboard contains one or more rows of buttons, with each row producing the notes of a single diatonic scale. The buttons on the bass-side keyboard are most commonly arranged in pairs, with one button of a pair sounding the fundamental of a chord and the other the corresponding major triad (or, sometimes, minor triad).
Diatonic button accordions are popular in many countries, and used mainly for playing popular music and traditional folk music, and modern offshoots of these genres.
History Like many modern instruments, the accordion was born of a fusion of inventions at the beginning of the 19th century. However the accordion's distant free reed ancestors were developed as early as 3000 BC in China and Laos, where instruments such as the sheng and the khene are still in use today. European travelers to Asia brought back descriptions of such instruments, and illustrations of them began appearing in the 1600 - 1700s. Combining the principle of the free reed with new technologies for machining and mass production that were emerging during the late 18th/early 19th centuries led to a ferment of invention that produced a great number of new instruments still in use today, such as the harmonium, the concertina, and the harmonica. Other instruments were less lucky and have left only rare examples found in museums--examples include the harmoniflute, the flutina, and the aeoline.
Because he filed the patent for it on May 6, 1829, Cyrill Demian, an Austrian of Armenian descent, is generally credited with having invented the accordion. The free reed instrument owes its name to the fact that each touch can produce a chord, that is, multiple tones in a harmonious combination. The instrument was designed to accompany singing with a simple harmony, but its basic principle, that of an instrument with bellows that were operated by the musician, which could produce chords at a touch, lent it to more varied uses.
The accordion was quickly copied and modified by other inventors and instrument makers: where Demian's invention played only chords for accompaniment, others transformed the right hand keyboard into one where each touch produced only a single note. Towards the middle of the 19th century, left-handed buttons for producing chords were also added. Louis Douce patented the unisonoric or double-action accordion in 1840, and Franz Walther made the first chromatic button accordion in 1850. It was not until the end of the 19th century that Paolo Soprani began mass-producing bisonoric accordions; these are the ancestors of today's piano (keyboard) accordions, which are chromatic rather than diatonic. The turn of the 20th century saw the appearance of the accordion with three rows of buttons, both chromatic and diatonic. Around this time, the industrial power of German manufacturers such as Hohner began to impose some standardization on the layout of the accordion keyboard, to wit: two rows of diatonic buttons separated by an ascending quarter.
Nomenclature Various terms for the diatonic button accordion are used in different parts of the English-speaking world.
In Britain and Australia, the term melodeon ( or ) is commonly used,Mallinson, Dave. The D/G Melodeon. Cleckheaton, Yorkshire: mally.com (2002) . Page 3. regardless of whether the instrument has one, two, or three rows of melody buttons. In Ireland, melodeon ( or ) is reserved for instruments with a single row of melody buttons (a "one-row" instrument), while instruments with two or three rows are called button accordions (often simply accordions).Vallely, Fintan (ed.), Companion to Irish Traditional Music, Cork University Press, Cork, Ireland, 2012. In North America, both one-row and multi-row instruments are usually simply called accordions. (Historically, the term melodeon was applied to various 19th-century free-reed organs.) More specifically, in African American folk tradition, the one-row instrument, still common in zydeco and Cajun music, was called a windjammer.
To simplify matters and avoid ambiguity, in the remainder of this article the term diatonic button accordion, or DBA, will be used.
International terms The Basque terms are trikiti, , or . The Brazilian Portuguese terms are (lit. eight basses), , (lit. goat foot), or . The Catalan term is . The Dutch terms are and . The Estonian term is . The Finnish term is In France, the term (familiarly, ) is used; is sometimes used for one-row instruments. The usual German terms are Ziehharmonika, Handharmonika or Knopfakkordeon. The Swiss variant, with a double-action bass keyboard, is known in the local German as a Schwyzerörgeli. The Alpine Austrian variant, with amplified bass notes reminiscent of the helicon tuba, is known in German as a Steirische Harmonika. In Italy, a diatonic button accordion is a or organetto. In Limburgish it is known as or / . The Lithuanian term is . In Mexico, as in Colombia, it is called or . The Norwegian term is (lit. two-row) or the general term (lit. major instrument), covering all number of rows. In Portugal (especially in the north) it is called concertina, not to be confused with the English word "concertina". The Russian term is garmon. The Czech term is heligonka. The Slovak term is heligónka. The Slovenian term is and more frequently The Swedish term is . In Argentina it is called a verdulera.
Glossary The following definitions will assist understanding of this article. DBA: abbreviation for diatonic button accordion single-action: refers to an instrument on which each key or button produces two notes,Smith, Graeme. "Modern-Style Irish Accordion Playing: History, Biography and Class" in Ethnomusicology, Vol. 41. No. 3, Fall 1997, page 3. as does bisonoric (a term recently coined on the model of the French bi-sonore and German wechseltönig) double-action: refers to an instrument on which each key or button produces a single note,Smith, page 3. as does unisonoric (recently coined as the counterpart of bisonoric) reversal: on a single-action instrument, a button or key which produces a note available elsewhere on the keyboard, but obtained by using the opposite bellows direction accidental: any note of the chromatic scale outside the diatonic scale of a DBA's "home" key
Action Most diatonic button accordions have a "single-action" (or bisonoric) keyboard, meaning that each button produces two notes: one when the bellows are pressed or pushed (closed) and another when the bellows are drawn or pulled (opened). In this respect, these instruments operate like a harmonica.
(In contrast, most other types of accordion, for example piano accordions and chromatic button accordions, are "double-action" – or unisonoric – because each key produces a single note regardless of bellows direction.)
Other single-action or bisonoric members of the free-reed family include the German concertina, the Anglo-German (or "Anglo") concertina, the bandoneon, the Chemnitzer concertina (see concertina) and the mouth organ (harmonica).
There are varieties of diatonic button accordion that are double-action, such as the garmon.
Distribution of notes on the keyboard and range Because each button produces two notes, the diatonic scale can be covered in four buttons on a melody row.
For example, on a melody row pitched in C, the notes of the lower full octave of the instrument's range are assigned to four buttons as follows:
+ First octave Button Push Pull 1 C D 2 E F 3 G A 4 C′ B
Note: the first button in the example above, numbered 1, is likely to be the 3rd or 4th button in a row on an instrument. Also note the pattern of push/pull to ascend the scale is broken on the return to the root note. This ensures that the root note in both octaves (in this example C and C') are in the same "push" direction. This also has the effect of keeping melody notes in an ideal direction for chords on the left hand.
When the bellows are pressed, every button produces a note from the major triad of the home key; in this case, the pattern CEG repeats itself throughout the keyboard. The remaining notes of the diatonic scale are produced when the bellows are drawn or pulled.
Since there are seven notes in the diatonic scale, and since each button produces two notes, the note pairings on the buttons change in each octave. In the second full octave of the instrument's range, E is paired with D (instead of with F in the first octave), and so on.
+ Second octave Button Push Pull 5 E′ D′ 6 G′ F′ 7 C″ A′ 8 E″ B′
Because the range of each row is typically restricted to two complete octaves (with a few notes above and below), the inconsistent note pairing from one octave to the next remains manageable.
For detailed diagrams of typical note layouts on various types of diatonic button accordion (DBA), see melodeon.net.
Available keys On a one-row DBA, music in a single major key and its relative minor can be played. For example, an instrument in D can play music in D major and B minor. However, the variety of music that can be played on a one-row instrument is wider than these facts might suggest: besides D major and B minor, our one-row instrument in D can play tunes in A Mixolydian and E Dorian, and tunes that use gapped scales, such as pentatonic tunes with a root of D, G or A.
Multi-row systems A one-row DBA has the advantages of being light and compact, but is by its nature limited to the notes of a single diatonic scale. Since the mid-to-late 19th century, instruments have been produced with more than one row in order to give players a greater choice of scales and tonalities.
Multi-row systems can be divided into two broad classes: "fourth-apart" systems and "semitone-apart" systems.
Fourth-apart systems Fourth-apart systems are the most widespread form of multi-row DBA. Moving from the outside of the keyboard towards the inside, each row is pitched one-fourth higher than its neighbour. Conventionally, the outer keyboard row is specified first: for an example, on a G/C instrument the outer row is in the key of G, the inner row in C.
Commonly used in continental Europe are two-row systems in G/C and C/F and three-row systems in G/C/F, but many other permutations exist. In England, in the latter part of the 20th century, the D/G configuration became firmly established as the standard for interpreting traditional music of England, and particularly for the accompaniment of social and Morris dancing.
Three-row systems are also popular in Mexico and the United States (in Conjunto, Tejano, Zydeco and Cajun musics) and Colombia (in Vallenato and Folklor musics). Tunings include B/E/A, A/D/G, G/C/F, F/B/E and E/A/D. The three-row fourth-apart configuration is known as the "international system."
Multi-row systems obviously extend the range of tonalities available. But since many notes in the additional rows are "reversals" (duplicate notes produced by the opposite bellows action), multi-row systems allow greater flexibility of phrasing, since the player can often choose whether or not to change bellows direction, or to harmonize with a particular chord, by choosing a note from one row or another. Styles of play have developed in which row-crossing allows the bass side to be used to maximum effect, and the number of changes of bellows direction greatly reduced.
Accidentals and reversals Another feature designed to increase the flexibility of fourth-apart systems is the inclusion of notes that lie beyond the diatonic scales of each row, or "accidentals". These notes are most often operated by the buttons at the top of the keyboard (that is, closest to the player's chin), below the lowest notes of the scale.