During the cruise just past I was waiting with a crowd of other losers, er, tourists, at the Hemmingway House in Key West, (and to quote Sean Cullen, ‘what a fucking rip-off’), when one of the passengers buttonholed me on the street to ask some extremely technical questions about the accordion. Among other things, the aspiring folk musician wanted to know if the tunes we played could be easily transferred to the piano accordion. 

I was at a session in St. John’s the other night when a similar question came up. I had just run through a set of Newfoundland accordion tunes, the brisk ‘singles’ used for step dancing, when another player asked me if I could play them on fiddle. The answer to both questions is a qualified ‘no’. 

There is a reason many traditional players eventually make their way to the violin, no matter where they start. (Or maybe it’s just a Newfoundland thing. As a rule, in Cape Breton, Ireland and other places where traditional music still thrives, you generally pick your instrument, and then stick with it until you are great, or get fed up and take up curling. Thanks to polymaths like Kelly Russell, around here it’s considered childish to only have one instrument at one’s disposal.  The laziest have a handle on two or three, and the best can easily work though a half dozen at a good session). At any rate, the prosaic say that the violin imitates the range of emotions offered by the human voice. There is some truth to that. And compared to limited diatonic instruments like an accordion or a tin whistle, the violin can just do a lot more stuff. You can play notes outside the scale, and if that Celtic mysticism is your thing, hit notes in-between the notes on the scale, and even slip and slide in-between those notes as well.   

Each button on a diatonic button accordion plays one note when you push it in, and one note when you pull it out. The single-key versions I play can only play notes in the key of the instrument. In other words, there are no black keys, if you want to use a piano metaphor. This means they are great for playing driving, fairly simple melodies, where powerful rhythms are more important than complex intervals. Nothing beats the button accordion for muscular punch, at least in the traditional world.  

Most Newfoundland dance music played on accordion is all about economy. The tunes themselves were learned and played as an adjunct to set dances, dances usually performed by a large group of people. The tunes emphasized the beat of the dance first, and whatever melody was necessary to underline the moves of the dance. Anything else was extraneous, particularly in the hands of accordion players who functioned as one-man bands. Even now, these tunes do not work that well on fiddle. Fiddle likes long flowing phrases, double-stops and a fluid change from one note to the next, not a bubbling and popping chop from phrase to phrase.   

That’s not to say that there is no cross-over. It is just that various tunes just flow better on one instrument than the other, and over time your repertoire adjusts accordingly. The elaborate fiddle tunes of Rufus Guinchard and Emile Benoit, (the two patriarchs of Newfoundland instrumental music), sound kind of half-baked on accordion. You can play most of the notes, but the nuances tend to get lost in all the pushing and pulling. On the other hand, driving accordion polkas like ‘The St. John’s Girl’, or the tunes by Minnie White, Vince Collins, Harry Hibbs and many others, sound simplistic and colourless when played on fiddle. They end up being all back and forth sawing, with none of the fiddles lyricism making it through all the bow strokes. 

The piano accordion is another issue entirely. That instrument is essentially a portable keyboard, a substitute piano or pipe organ. Although a few local players use them for instrumental music, (Ray Walsh, Joe Tompkins and Alan’s mom among them), the big boxes never caught on with the public at large. Because piano accordions are fully chromatic, the pushing and pulling which is so much a part of a diatonic accordion’s sound instead functions just as a way of moving air through the instrument. It allows the sound, rather than forcing it. While the piano accordion is infinitely more subtle, and way better at playing a range of notes, like the fiddle it lacks the brawny power of its’ buttoned cousin. It is actually quite easy to transfer button (or even fiddle) repertoire onto this instrument. Will it sound the same? No. Does it matter?  It all depends what you are trying to do. Ask a painter why he doesn’t just take a photograph, and you’ll get all the answers you need. 

And so to answer a couple of the other questions that stem from all this, first, finding examples of all this does require some effort. You can find Harry Hibbs 70s’ style button accordion on Itunes, as well as a pretty representative album by Frank Maher, but after that you’ll need to dig deeper. Emile and Rufus’s music has been well recorded, and their stuff is out there, as are other examples of the two instrumental worlds. Both O’Brien’s Music Store and Fred’s Records both have good websites, if you can’t find anything interesting call the stores. They are both old-school - the people who work in them know the inventory, and have reliable opinions. 

The answer to the second question is obvious, (well, obvious to me, anyway): learn them all.