This recording focuses on a single type of piece, the polka, as interpreted by a Euro-American musician at a particular moment in American culture. It is the accordion’s potential to be a highbrow, classical instrument and its symphonic, indoor concert-ready character that Deiro (and Doktorski) aim to establish. The moral virtues of accordion playing were stressed in the overwhelmingly successful advertising and door-to-door marketing campaigns of accordion manufacturers in partnership with accordion studios throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The present-day associations of the accordion were once (and, where I live in upstate New York, are still) with bands, dance halls, and state fairs, a visible and wholesome expression of communal American values. Although Doktorski plays a modern Victoria Emperor accordion, he succeeds in re-creating the style and feeling of early accordion music. Those accustomed to the sound of the accordion in French or Italian music will therefore be surprised at what they hear in this album. These features of early accordions would have given Deiro’s instrument a lighter, brighter sound. The older accordions were “dry-tuned,” in contracts to the “wet” tuning of the musette accordions, with their distinctive vibrato resulting from pairs of reeds tuned a microtone apart. There were no piccolo reeds (the high reeds used in many modern accordion models). The older accordions had no tone chamber, and they were equipped only with low and middle reeds. The accordion Deiro played on the 78s would have sounded much different from the modern piano accordions. Doktorski’s success in generating interest in the works of Pietro Deiro’s equally famous brother and rival, Guido (1886-1950) and the early history of the piano accordion in America can also be measured by Doktorski’s recordings of Guido Deiro’s music and a six-CD set he issued on the Italian label Bella Musica, containing the original 78 rpm recordings of Pietro Deiro’s works.
Bass accordion method 1937 series#
As this CD is the first of a series of recordings of Deiro’s repertoire, we can look forward to future volumes of waltzes, marches, foxtrots, mazurkas, pasodobles, rumbas, Spanish dances, boleros, characteristic dances, preludes, six grandes etudes de concert, six overtures and three concerti. He is also the founder of The Classical Free-Reed, Inc., a journal and web site devoted to the accordion in which he has published articles and reviews.
This music may seem dated, but its aim was instant gratification, and it still delivers.Ĭelebrated Polkas is the creation of accordionist Henry Doktorski, a concert accordionist and instructor of accordion at Duquesne University. The titles of these pieces, “Twinkle Toe Polka,” “Polka Bohemienne,” “Pasta Fagioli,” and “Vivacity Polka,” immediately evoke the forgotten pleasures of turn-of-the-century musical Americana, suppressed in the postmodern cultural memory. Although the polka is familiar to most people, Deiro’s compositions in the genre reflect a style and sensibility that is likely to sound exotic to a modern listener.
The composer featured on this album, Pietro Deiro (1888-1954), was a founding father of the piano accordion in America and one of the first to perform that instrument in public-the self-proclaimed “daddy of the accordion.” Yet he remains unfamiliar to all but students and aficionados of the accordion.
Thankfully, a recent compact disc recording by Henry Doktorski will draw public attention to the origins of the accordion’s “Golden Age” in the 1910s and 1920s. The names that we recall of the people who helped the accordion (and the polka) take root in every mid-twentieth-century American living room are often limited to the overexposed Lawrence Welk and his younger colleague Dick Contino (he of “Lady of Spain” fame). To many people the pairing of the words “accordion” and “polka” evokes images of men in lederhosen performing at Midwestern beer halls. JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN MUSIC (2009) Volume 3, Number 1, pp.
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