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National Accordion Awareness Month?


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My buddy Bob Godfried alerted me to this and wrote.

 

"What do you call ten accordions at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start."

 

June is National Accordion Awareness Month

http://www.ladyofspain.com/NAAM.html

 

On the NAAM site they claim to promote just about all free reeders and write:

 

"When people think of an accordion, they usually envision that large, black monstrosity with piano keys on one side and about a thousand buttons on the other side. However, the accordion family also includes Cajun button boxes, chromatic and diatonic button accordions, the concertina, the bayan, and the bandoneon."

 

Anyone here a member?

 

Jody

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My buddy Bob Godfried alerted me to this and wrote.

 

"What do you call ten accordions at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start."

 

this makes me wonder what obscure instrument none of us has ever heard of has it's proponents making jokes about concertina players. i don't think i've ever heard an accordion player tell a joke about concertinas implying that they are inferior to accordions. but there must be someone telling jokes about us, tired of their instruments always being mistaken for concertinas by people who don't know better and who don't care that they don't know any better.

 

of course there are plenty of people in the world that don't like accordions for various reasons. there was the collaboration a few years back between david soldier and komar & melamid called "the people's choice music" where they composed music based on what people said on a survey. they composed two pieces, one that would appeal to the most people, and one that would be hated by as many people as possible. it turned out that most people listed accordions and bagpipes as their least favorite instruments. ( http://www.diacenter.org/km/musiccd.html )

 

i don't really understand why people don't like accordions. i like them as long as i'm not the person that has to lug the thing around. but i get annoyed as anyone else here when people think i play the accordion. i don't really mind it the first time they say it, but i really do wish they could remember. accordion players always seem to know what a concertina is and even entertain the idea of learning to play one until i tell them how much i had to pay for mine. but when i tell other people i play the concertina, and they ask me "what's that?" i don't know what else to tell them except that it's kind of like a little accordion and that sometimes you see them in old cartoons.

 

but back to my original thought, the tendency of concertina players to tell accordion jokes reminds me of how students at the agricultural college will tell jokes about the research university, and try to build up a kind of rivalry where none exists. but what is so puzzling in our case is that if you take a concertina and an accordion and compare them to an agricultural college and a research university, and try to decide which corresponds to which, it's really the other way around from what you would guess based on who's telling the jokes about the other one.

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June is National Accordion Awareness Month...

Does that mean we can forget about them the rest of the time? B)

 

Anybody else notice that the web site says "2005"?

It doesn't appear to have been updated for this year.

Read into that what you will.

 

...there must be someone telling jokes about us, tired of their instruments always being mistaken for concertinas by people who don't know better and who don't care that they don't know any better.

The ocarina? :unsure:

 

i don't really understand why people don't like accordions.

I think it's mainly that they blame the instrument itself for the way so many people play it. Though there's probably a subset of people who hate it because they were forced to take lessons on it as a kid.

 

...if you take a concertina and an accordion and compare them to an agricultural college and a research university, and try to decide which corresponds to which, it's really the other way around from what you would guess based on who's telling the jokes about the other one.

Other way from what you would guess, I suppose. I wouldn't even try to guess. I was a techie, not an aggie, but my school didn't have rivalries with ag schools, only with other tech schools.

 

...is anyone doing a Piano Accordion Recycling workshop this year?

Alan, did you mean "Reed Cycling"? :unsure:

 

In the USA, National Headache Awareness Week is also in June.

NHAW

There are people who need to be reminded to be aware of their headaches??!!! It makes my head hurt just to think about it! :(

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. accordion players always seem to know what a concertina is and even entertain the idea of learning to play one until i tell them how much i had to pay for mine. but when i tell other people i play the concertina, and they ask me "what's that?" i don't know what else to tell them except that it's kind of like a little accordion and that sometimes you see them in old cartoons.

:D The best incorrect identification of my concertina was one May morning in Oxford while playing for a Morris side when a very well spoken chap congratulated me on my lovely harpsichord!!

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...lovely harpsichord... :D :D :D

 

 

 

It's Friday, and they're probably older than me, but what the heck:

 

What is wrong with 4 accordionists driving off a cliff in an MPV?

You could easily fit 3 more in there.

 

-------------------

 

Why is an accordian better than a melodian?

Because it burns longer.

 

-------------------

 

Whats Perfect Pitch?

When you throw a melodian into the toilet without hitting the rim.

 

-------------------

 

 

Andy

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I'd be willing to bet that one reason that people get so snarky about accordions is Lawrence Welk.

At the time Welks Television show aired in the USA, the Rock and Roll kids, along with the "British Invasion" had totally blown just about everything else out of the water, especially Polka, which, like Country and Western, became ever associated with "squares" and unsavory unsophisticates..."a buncha pure-D nosepickers" my cousin Ted used to call them.

Lawrence Welk's show almost put a death grip on Polka; I'm glad that it survived the assault though.

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My accordian and I went everywhere. It got played to a bunch of skinheads in the chip shop at midnight on Xmas eve, up mountains, in burning boats (Cambridge university thing I'm afraid), down potholes, while abseiling out of windows, to Stoke city supporters on a train, at sea, in Turkey at sea, (on one memorable occasion, tired of being the entertainment for a flotilla sailing holiday I 'forgot' to bring it ashore. Lo and behold, the turk who owned this restaurant in the middle of nowhere happened to own an accordian.). Plus all the usual stuff and lots I've forgotten. You couldn't measure the fun I had out of it.

 

I hope I'll carry on like that with the concertina; but accordians are relatively cheap and easy to pick up and great fun. My duet is, of course, smaller and more sophisticated in every way which now allows me to enjoy accordian jokes.

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My accordian and I went everywhere.

I used to know an accordianist who took his accordian with him to Burma and India in WW11 :D , he somehow managed to keep it going in the jungle and made lots of friends with Indian troops who used to take him to their film shows. It got dropped off a boat when disembarking somewhere and he had another one sent out. He'd been taught to play by an accordian teacher and was a pleasure to listen to, classical music, big band dance tunes, popular songs (from the 30's, 40's and 50's) and all with the proper bass accompianment on the left hand, he could even do solo's on the bass side :D

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My accordian and I went everywhere. ... You couldn't measure the fun I had out of it.

 

I hope I'll carry on like that with the concertina; but accordians are relatively cheap and easy to pick up and great fun. My duet is, of course, smaller and more sophisticated in every way which now allows me to enjoy accordian jokes.

I used to know an accordianist who took his accordian with him to Burma and India in WW11 :D ... [He] was a pleasure to listen to, classical music, big band dance tunes, popular songs (from the 30's, 40's and 50's) and all with the proper bass accompianment on the left hand, he could even do solo's on the bass side :D

In the end, it's not the instrument so much as what you do with it. One can do "surprisingly" sophisticated things with very simple instruments, or make musically simple playing sound "sophisticated" by playing with feeling.

 

One of my Polish friends does beautiful stuff on the 120-bass PA he keeps at home, but on the boat he can still get an amazing variety of styles and emotion out of a little 12-bass that looks like it has just been dredged up from the bottom of the bay. :)

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