The pirate squeezebox that no pirate ever played
Films love to hand a concertina to a sea shanty-singing pirate, but the instrument was invented around a century after the Golden Age of Piracy. It appeared almost simultaneously in England in 1829 and Germany in 1834, and its two versions ended up dividing drawing rooms from dance halls.
A concertina is a free-reed instrument like the accordion and harmonica, with bellows between two ends that carry the buttons. In England the scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone patented his design in 1829, and in Germany Carl Friedrich Uhlig introduced his five years later. The two families work differently. English concertinas are small, usually hexagonal, and play the same note whether the bellows push or pull, with the scale alternating between the hands for fast melodies. German ones are larger, often square, and sound a different note in each direction.
The difference became a matter of class. Cheap and easy German concertinas were imported in large numbers into England, Ireland and North America and were seen as a lower-class instrument for popular dance tunes. The English concertina, meanwhile, carried an air of bourgeois respectability as a parlour instrument for classical music. English makers answered the German craze with the hybrid Anglo concertina, using a German button layout built the English way.
Being compact, concertinas travelled well, and soldiers, sailors and cowboys carried them; one even joined Robert Peary's Greenland expedition of 1891 to 1892. The Salvation Army used them in bands across the English-speaking world. German emigrants took the Chemnitzer to the American Midwest, where it became a polka staple, and the bandoneon to Argentina. Originally meant as a cheap substitute for church organs, the bandoneon became the essential voice of the tango orchestra.
The accordion and mass-produced pianos pushed the concertina aside in the early 20th century, and Germany's concertina clubs vanished under the Nazis. It survived in pockets: Irish traditional music, English Morris dancing, Afrikaner music and among Zulus, who nicknamed it the squashbox. The 1960s folk revival and a later tango revival have brought new players back.
Source: Concertina
