Few instruments have lived so torrid a life, in so short a time, as the accordion. Ever since the Austrian organ builder Cyril Demian patented his free-reed creation in 1828, accordions of all shapes, sizes, and configurations have been cast as humble squeezeboxes, gleaming machines of the industrial revolution, and the epitome of kitsch. They have been the chosen tools of classical virtuosos and the carriers of myriad folk traditions.Footnote ¹ Whereas the accordion's cultural value and musical worth have been debated since its invention, the new millennium has, so far, treated it well. The avant-garde, folk, pop, and world music scenes have all embraced the accordion and its “retro,” even postmodern, sound.

Meanwhile, a growing cadre of scholars, primarily working in the field of ethnomusicology, is turning its attention to the instrument as an artistic and cultural phenomenon. Two such monographs, both recently published by the University of Illinois Press, promise to educate music scholars about the history and diversity of free-reeds around the world while also advocating for the value of attending more closely to the accordion-infused soundscape of the twenty-first century.

Marion Jacobson's Squeeze This! A Cultural History of the Accordion in America is an enthralling monograph that explores the history, diverse cultural meanings, and multifaceted musical and social roles of the piano accordion in the United States. Inspired by a chance encounter with a piano accordion in a Manhattan music store, where she was dazzled by the instrument's possibilities, Jacobson embarked upon a decade-long journey across the United States to investigate the piano accordion's past and present, a journey that culminated in this valuable book. The accordion is presented throughout as a symbol of ethnic and national identity, a reflection of shared cultural values, and as a way for diverse groups of people to engage in dialogue with audiences and fellow musicians across the nation, whether they play polkas, tarantellas, Bach, or rock.

In Squeeze This!, Jacobson treats the accordion as “a thing with a complex ‘social life,’ career, and networks of exchange” (5), drawing upon a wealth of research in ethnomusicology and anthropology, including the work of James Clifford, Arjun Appadurai, Kevin Dawe, and Andrew Bennett. She approaches the accordion as a “cultural technology,” a “network of circulating objects and relationships involving musical skills and a means of organizing cultural work” (6). This orientation shapes the book's attention, not simply to accordion repertories, but also to the many ways in which the piano accordion's manufacture, design, marketing, and consumption by the U.S. public has contributed to its cultural significance. From this perspective, one of the more interesting themes that emerges from this approach is the accordion's gradual transition from a disdained immigrant instrument, in the beginning of the twentieth century, to a shiny, ultra-modern musical machine representing mainstream 1950s white America—a product of what Jacobson calls the “accordion industrial complex” (52). From there, Jacobson shows us how the accordion became a symbol of banal decadence and nostalgic schmaltz after the triumph of rock and roll, finally achieving its recent resurgence of popularity in the postpunk era, when it has been embraced by the counterculture as well as the mainstream as a compelling, warm, and physically engaging instrument.

Jacobson begins by tracing the history of the accordion from its beginnings in nineteenth-century Europe through its introduction to the United States by the early twentieth century, explaining the details of accordion design and function and the difference between the piano accordion and the diatonic button accordions that it largely displaced. Her discussion of the issues surrounding innovations in construction and aesthetics is supported by a wealth of gorgeous full-color plates and historic photographs. She examines how mass-produced accordions reached mainstream American society and homes through accordion schools, method books, clever marketing, and inclusion in programs of “highbrow” classical music. Jacobson further details the instrument's rise to pop stardom with the likes of 1950s Italian-American idol Dick Contino, its triumph in the lives of the white middle class through the careers of Lawrence Welk and Myron Floren, and its eventual fall from popularity as rock and roll told hold among American youth, and accordion manufacturers and educators failed to adequately respond to issues of taste, image, and cost in the 1960s.

The second half of the book is dedicated to the “accordion revival” of the 1980s and 1990s, in which Jacobson shows how artists such as They Might Be Giants, Those Darn Accordions, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Carl Finch, and Guy Klucevsek used the instrument as a subversively creative tool for social commentary and musical exploration. She invokes David Byrne's characterization of acoustic instruments as “machines of joy” (163) to explain the appeal of the accordion to audiences and musicians alienated by the electronically produced sounds of the disco and techno era. Finally, Jacobson investigates accordion clubs, festivals, and music scenes in Texas and California. Emphasizing the “grassroots” character of these local scenes, where citizens join together to share their love of the instrument and a diversity of musical styles, Jacobson argues that the accordion has not only become an important means of forming and interrogating group identity, but has also gained even farther-reaching political and cultural capital as a means of both participating in and subverting the imperatives of the “world music” industry.

Jacobson's focus on the rise and fall of the “accordion industrial complex,” along with the avant-garde and pop rediscovery of the instrument, also leads to its almost exclusive focus on the piano accordion. Squeeze This! leaves to other scholars the task of developing a comprehensive account of the diverse free-reed instrumental family, of which the piano accordion is only one—highly visible and highly audible—member. Fortunately, ethnomusicologist Helena Simonett's edited volume, The Accordion in the Americas: Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More!, covers a wide range of button and piano accordions and functions as an excellent complement to Jacobson's more specific study.

One of the special challenges (and advantages) of researching the accordion is that it entered various traditions in the relatively recent past, sometimes within or almost within living memory. A combination of ethnographic fieldwork and historical research can thus lead to nuanced insights into the instrument's role in a given musical culture since its adoption, enabling a long view of local histories and their previously hidden interactions. Such is the goal of The Accordion in the Americas, the first book-length volume of musicological essays in English to focus exclusively on the instrument. The Accordion in the Americas provides an in-depth introduction to the mechanical, musical, and social workings of free-reed instruments in the New World, and it encompasses an impressive range of musical genres, social issues, and geographic regions: Argentine tango, Brazilian forró, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, Klezmer, Cajun, Creole, Tejano, Norteño, the Waila music of the Tohono O’odham people in Arizona, Italian-American piano accordion music, the new music composer William Schimmel's “musical realities,” and the multi-ethnic accordion culture along the South Shore of Lake Superior.

As Simonett points out, “accordion traditions speak to the power struggles between social classes as well as to the makings, politics, and aesthetics of popular music” (9). Many of the contributions to the volume are rooted in a view of the accordion as a child of the transition to industrialized society, with both the rural Old World and the urban New World encoded in the instrument's DNA. Indeed, a common thread throughout the book is the accordion as both a mass-produced commercial commodity, embodying the industrialized, factory-driven modern world, and a warm, human, and infinitely particular instrument, frequently customized and personalized to cater to the aesthetic and emotional desires of local musicians and audiences. Dominican players add an extra key for embellishment (264) and re-tune the reeds to achieve a “harder” and “stronger” sound, combining “masculine” and “feminine” reeds (256); Waila musicians often remove the bass reeds to make the instrument more nimble (117–18); Cajun accordions are built and tuned in a manner that reflects the community's traditional values of self-sufficiency and an aversion to materialism (53–54); and players from many traditions adorn their instruments with their names, decorate them with rhinestones, or paint the bellows with their national flag. Of course, this personalization extends to the music played on the instrument. This process is most eloquently discussed by Joshua Horowitz in his essay on the Klezmer accordion and Janet L. Sturman in her piece on the Waila accordion, both of whom discuss the adaptation of vocal techniques and aesthetics in instrumental accordion music.

It may seem surprising that a volume written by ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and folklorists draws so heavily on archival research. However, because the book aims to tell the diverging stories of the accordion throughout the New World, a thorough historical explication is necessary for each case study. Many of the historically focused essays in the volume are excellent. For example, Simonett's “Introduction” and chapter “From Old World to New Shores” are meticulously researched and highly informative, chronicling the accordion's Central European beginnings, evolution, and trans-Atlantic journeys in the hands and steamer trunks of European migrants and merchants. The anthropologist Megwen Loveless provides a thorough biography of Brazilian accordionist and popular icon Luiz Gonzaga, and María Susana Azzi expertly tells the story of the Argentine tango's bandoneón and its chief exponents. Unfortunately, Richard March's “semischolarly essay” (9) on accordion jokes seems out of place in an otherwise rigorous collection.

The volume's most outstanding contributions are those that integrate archival research with original ethnographic fieldwork. Sydney Hutchinson's chapter “No ma’ se oye el fuinfán: The Noisy Accordion in the Dominican Republic,” James P. Leary's essay “Accordions and Working-Class Culture along Lake Superior's South Shore,” and Janet L. Sturman's chapter “Preserving Territory: The Changing Language of the Accordion in Tohono O’odham Waila Music” all deftly weave the two approaches into the overarching historical narrative; engage with contemporary issues of gender, race, class consciousness, marginality, and belonging; and explore the technical and aesthetic aspects of the music and the people who play it. This creative marriage of archival and ethnographic techniques sets a high standard for future investigations into historically marginalized traditions.

A volume dealing with such a rich and diverse world of music should be expected to push the boundaries of the print medium, and the sheer wealth of information in The Accordion in the Americas squeezes those limits like a fully extended bellows. Though the endnotes provide many useful references to specific albums, artists’ websites, and YouTube videos, and the quality of the scholarly contributions is uniformly high, the arguments of some essays would have been strengthened had they included visual aids, such as transcriptions. This absence is sorely felt when the authors discuss the minutiae of accordion technique and ornamentation, such as in Joshua Horowitz's otherwise excellent article on the accordion in Klezmer, and Sydney Hutchinson's essay on the Dominican accordion. Because one of the themes that emerges from the collection as a whole is the astounding diversity of tunings and keyboard layouts on both the bass and treble sides of button and piano accordions, it is surprising that only one out of fourteen chapters, Mark DeWitt's essay on the Cajun accordion, includes an easy-to-read fingering chart. (Egberto Bermúdez's chapter on Colombian accordion traditions features a reproduction of a nineteenth-century fingering chart, and Jared Snyder lists the pitches for two different tuning systems historically used by Louisiana Creole accordionists.) The collection would be greatly enhanced, especially for the benefit of the many accordion players who will find it an invaluable resource, by the inclusion of an appendix with button layouts for each type of accordion discussed in the book.

If Squeeze This! and The Accordion in the Americas mark the beginning of serious English-language scholarship on the accordion in all its guises, this beginning is an auspicious one. These excellent scholars, many of whom are at the beginning of their careers, will surely continue to explore the wide world of button boxes and fill the formidable gap in academic literature on the accordion in all its guises.