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Accordion Jokes?

Not exactly a joke, though I laughed: I was reading the great Hector Berlioz's "Treatise on Instrumentation" from the mid 1850s, later updated by Richard Strauss, and all they say about the accordion is that it "used to be" a musical toy that soon fell into disfavor. A toy!
 
lestermann said:
Not exactly a joke, though I laughed: I was reading the great Hector Berlioz's "Treatise on Instrumentation" from the mid 1850s, later updated by Richard Strauss, and all they say about the accordion is that it "used to be" a musical toy that soon fell into disfavor. A toy!
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There is little enough funny about it when you look at the instrument called "accordion" in the 1850s. The only music style where anything akin to it is used with some regularity is Cajun, and even those rather limited instruments tend to come with more reed sets than the historic accordions.

What we typically call "accordion" these days bears less similarity with the instruments that treatise is about than a saxophone does with a baroque clarinet.
 
Rodney said:
Are you referring to the Chalumeau that preceded the clarinet?
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I have no idea. I was just windbagging some smart-sounding analogy. I actually wanted to say "oboe d'amore" but decided I should at least go with a single rather than double reed blade to better match the saxophone. But that made me venture farther outside of my realm of knowledge than even my first choice would have been.
 
dak said:
There is little enough funny about it when you look at the instrument called "accordion" in the 1850s. The only music style where anything akin to it is used with some regularity is Cajun, and even those rather limited instruments tend to come with more reed sets than the historic accordions.

What we typically call "accordion" these days bears less similarity with the instruments that treatise is about than a saxophone does with a baroque clarinet.
Click to expand...
Indeed the Berlioz & Strauss book is outdated and based on impressions of instruments that changed a lot. I found it interesting that they have entries with respectful opinions about the concertina and the melodeon though, whereas only the accordion is called a "toy" and deserved no entry.
 
 
 
 
I don't remember if this was mentioned - when talking to a machinist today about me making custom parts for an accordion he asked me if I'd heard that you've done a good job if you throw a banjo into a dumpster and it smashes a hole into an accordion. Ha.
 
murathan said:
acc.jpg
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I've seen somethings written, deliberately, where the words are so mangled you'd assume it wasn't a language you knew, if you looked closely, but you can read it just fine glancing at it.

People are excellent at "fixing" things unconsciously. Making them what they expect to see. A lot of things.
 
Xiane said:
People are excellent at "fixing" things unconsciously. Making them what they expect to see. A lot of things.
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If our brains were not good at repair, so many things would be hard to read: lots of emails, text messages, anything on "social media", product manuals, advertisements, some published news stories, almost anything translated from other languages...
 
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