Bandoneon / Bandonica In Victorian Luton

[makeitfolky]

I came across this photo in an antique shop today as a part of a Victorian Photo Album. The Photo, dated through clothes to be around 1878 - 1882, shows a studio portrait of a family taken by the Luton photographer Frederick Thurston. I haven't fully scrutinised the album yet, but it appears that the family in question are possibly identified elsewhere in the album, and are possibly English.

 

It seems unusual to have a Bandoneon in England in this period so I just wondered if anyone may have any thoughts / comments?

 

Cheers

Christian

[Sebastian]

It's not clear (from this photography) if it is a bandonion or not.

[JimLucas]

It seems unusual to have a Bandoneon in England in this period so I just wondered if anyone may have any thoughts / comments?

 

I believe at least some simple (i.e., 2-row) German concertinas (now included in the term "anglo") of that era (and even more recently) had square ends.

 

Can anybody here give us the time line for development of the bandonion, Chemnitzer and other "expanded" concertinas of the German family?

[Sebastian]

On bandonion info there is a nice gallery with pictures and information about german concertinas and banodnions from ca. 1830 onwards.

[Stephen Chambers]

It's not clear (from this photography) if it is a bandonion or not.

 

Unfortunately the man has the buttons of the instrument covered by his fingers, so we can't actually see any of them, but that in itself suggests to me that it probably doesn't have many of them anyway (or else we might be able to see at least some of them) - whilst there were large, square, 20-key (and 28-key) German double-reeded concertinas being built in the exact same style as this one in the 1840s and 1850s. I have some of them in my collection, one of which is a 20-key internally signed ‘Höselbarth’ (the early Chemnitz maker Johann Gottlieb Höselbarth) and extremely similar to a 20-key one, Kat.-Nr. 5171, attributed to the inventor Carl Friederich Uhlig (though I suspect that it too may also have been made by Höselbarth) in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum, Berlin.

 

So I think it's most-likely something relatively simple like that.

 

It seems unusual to have a Bandoneon in England in this period so I just wondered if anyone may have any thoughts / comments?

 

I believe at least some simple (i.e., 2-row) German concertinas (now included in the term "anglo") of that era (and even more recently) had square ends.

 

ALL the earliest German concertinas were rectangular in shape, like the 2-row one by Carl Friedrich Pirner of Chemnitz that I wrote about and illustrated in my Michaelstein Conference Paper - and some cheaper models were still being made like that in the 1860s when the German concertina was at the peak of its popularity, after prices came down following the shifting of their manufacture from the industrial city of Chemnitz (where they were invented, but costs were high) to rural Klingenthal (where costs were low).

 

Can anybody here give us the time line for development of the bandonion, Chemnitzer and other "expanded" concertinas of the German family?

 

Not without spending more time than I have in doing so Jim, and it wouldn't really be significant because Chemnitzer and Carlsfelder concertinas, and Bandonions, were all being made at least a quarter of a century before the photo appears to have been taken - and, though not at all common, those instruments were not totally unknown in England either.

Edited November 25, 2015 by Stephen Chambers

[Stephen Chambers]

The Photo, dated through clothes to be around 1878 - 1882, shows a studio portrait of a family taken by the Luton photographer Frederick Thurston.

 

I did a quick bit of online research on the photographer and it seems Frederick Thurston only founded his business about 1883: http://www.harpenden-history.org.uk/page_id__529.aspx