Band in a box: The deep connection between the accordion and the dance floor

Maria Kalaniemi got her hands on a five-course accordion at the age of eight, thanks to her grandmother. The cornerstone of the repertoire for this instrument in Finland is dance music: waltzes, tangos, schlagers and jenkkas (a specifically Finnish form of schottise).

“As a child, I learned my first waltzes before I even entered the music institute. Once I was there, I learned Baroque and contemporary music, but I continued to play dance gigs too. The music institute had a folk music group, and it was great that I was able to play “Säkkijärven polkka” [a well-known Finnish folk tune] as the required etude in an examination,” says Kalaniemi. 

Kalaniemi is known as a pioneer of the concert accordion or melody bass accordion in the context of folk music. Appearing on more than 150 recordings, she has created a stellar international career and has been awarded the State Prize for the Arts in Finland and membership of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music

“What I learned playing dance gigs has informed all the music I have ever played: the performance must be inspiring for a dancer, you have to have rhythm and flow, and you have to establish a rapport with the audience.”

Maria Kalaniemi in a pioneer in using the concert accordion in the context of folk music. Photo: Pentti Hokkanen

The accordion is an instrument with universal appeal particularly in accompanying dances. Developed in parallel by multiple instrument builders in the 1820s and 1830s, this new bellows-fed free reed aerophone soon became a hit in Europe and in the Americas: it was affordable, audible and portable, and a single musician could play both melody and accompaniment on it.

Variants of the accordion can be heard as an essential element in dance music around the world; examples include the musette in France, the milonga in Argentine, the forró in Brazil, the cumbia in Columbia and the zydeco in Louisiana. Although some dance styles popular in Finland, such as the waltz, can be found in many other countries, there are certain genres that are quintessentially Finnish: jenkkas, fast polkas in minor keys – and of course the Finnish tango.

“The earliest recorded information we have of the arrival of the accordion in Finland comes from newspaper stories and customs manifests dating from the 1850s. Accordions were imported together with the other trending instrument of the era, the piano,” says Markku Lepistö, an accordion player and scholar whose artistically oriented doctorate focused on the history of the accordion in 19th-century Finland.

“There is very little written material from those first decades. The accordion was surely adopted as a dance music instrument at an early stage, but the press would not have been interested in such a thing. This instrument was too new to be accepted into the folk musician competitions held at the turn of the 20th century. Meanwhile, the upper classes and bourgeoisie preferred the piano.”

But it was with the common people that the accordion became a great hit. Accordions were sold in town and country alike, in bookshops and at markets, and they were played at fairs and dances. When the three-course and five-course chromatic accordions arrived on the scene in the early 20th century, folk music and what we might call popular music began to diverge.

“With the advent of gramophone records, everyone could hear chromatic accordions and the imported new music styles. Musicians soon adopted the new trends, and the traditional one-course and two-course accordions quickly became unfashionable,” Lepistö explains.

The soundscape of the accordion was a pleasant mix of the familiar and the new, and as all keys were now available thanks to the new chromatic instruments, the accordion was adopted by the orchestras that toured dance pavilions.

“The golden age of the accordion in Finland lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s. Guitar bands and rock music then began to displace dance orchestras, but folk music competitions that were instituted in South Ostrobothnia in the 1950s fostered a new boom in pelimanni [fiddler] music, and musicians dug up again the simpler accordions of their youth.”

From folk tunes to electronic dances

The pelimanni music culture of South Ostrobothnia and its simple accordions formed the musical environment in which Antti Paalanen grew up. Today, his poltergeist-like alter ego charms festival crowds around the world, as he combines pelimanni music with the aesthetics of electronic dance music.

“I joined a study group for two-course accordion at the Alavus community college at the age of eight. We learned old folk tunes by ear from master folk musician, accordionist Airi Hautamäki. She had learned them directly from famous folk musicians in the region, who in turn had learned them at the turn of the 20th century. They were basically all dance tunes, and we used to play them at festivals and village halls. At that time, in the late 1980s, a lot of people still came to dance to these old folk dances, which had long before disappeared from the mainstream dance pavilions,” Paalanen recalls.

As folk music and schlager went their separate ways, violins and other folk instruments disappeared from dance pavilions – but the accordion stayed.

“By then, it must already have become firmly embedded in the context of dance music, where it had been adopted almost immediately on arrival in Finland. Its versatility must be one reason for this, since a single musician can accompany an evening dance on it if necessary. It probably retained its place in the schlager repertoire because of the huge popularity of the tango.”

Paalanen’s music takes the accordion a few steps towards today’s dance culture: night clubs and raves.

“That was not necessarily a conscious choice but an outcome of my personal history. I listened to rock and heavy metal in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, when I was a teenager, electronic music was everywhere. I’ve tried to explore how my instrument could fit into these music cultures, seeking the rebel feeling that there was in the early 20th century: young people loved the accordion, but older people and the intelligentsia disparaged it.”

Around the time when the folk music boom of the 1950s began, accordion championships began to emerge in the popular music sphere too. The repertoire was very much Finnish at the time, but from the 1970s onwards, virtuoso pieces from elsewhere in Europe began to make appearances.

The best known of Finland’s accordion competitions is the Golden Accordion, which in its heyday was televised live and had an audience of more than one million. Maria Kalaniemi became the first ever winner of this competition in 1983, at the age of 19. At that time, the competition repertoire was made up of evergreens.

“My teacher persuaded me to enter. Although I’m generally not competitive, it was a wonderful experience, because I love and cherish the music that I’d learned when playing dance gigs,” says Kalaniemi. 

“Folk music and old dance music enjoyed a closer relationship in Finland than in the other Nordic countries. We’ve always been able to mix up tango and polska.”

Exploring boundaries

For Viivi Maria Saarenkylä, winning the Golden Accordion in 2010 was only the beginning. She was 17 at the time, and on the strength of this victory she went on to study with Renzo Ruggieri, an Italian accordionist specialising in variety show repertoire. Under his tutelage, she won accordion competitions in Castelfidardo and Val Tidone and placed second in the Coupe Mondiale and Trophée Mondial competitions of international accordion music associations.

“The competitions are divided into the classical category and the variety category, which is everything else, and I entered the latter. I wanted to see how well I could do and was interested to learn new repertoire that wasn’t known in Finland,” Saarenkylä recalls.

She explains that young musicians were in two minds about the Golden Accordion: for those focusing on classical music, it was either irrelevant or too popular; she herself, however, was fascinated by the popular and jazzy repertoire in the competition.

“I did play a lot of classical music as well at the music institute, and I played folk music and evergreens that people wanted to hear when I was busking in Savonlinna, my hometown.”

After the competitions, Saarenkylä continued her studies in the Global Music programme at the Sibelius Academy. The networks she established at an early age thanks to the competitions helped her export her own music when the time came.

“It was a simple matter to message my contacts when Hildá Länsman and myself had founded our duo Vildá. We were booked at accordion festivals abroad even before we had released our début album,” Saarenkylä says.

“Although I’ve been attracted by the music cultures of other countries and continents from an early age, I developed an interest in Finnish folk music through my studies and the groups I’ve founded. As a Finnish musician, the best way to get your music out there is to invest it with a Finnish or Northern identity.”

In classical music, one of the most prominent international accordion competitions is Arrasate Hiria in the Basque Country in Spain. It has been won by several Finns: Janne Rättyä, Ari Lehtonen and most recently Janne Valkeajoki. Born in Lappeenranta, Valkeajoki developed an interest in Baroque and contemporary music at the age of 12 and has since studied to be a conductor in addition to playing classical accordion.

“Contemporary music accounts for such a huge portion of accordion repertoire that every professional has to establish themselves in it somehow. Accordion players are often drawn to Baroque music as well, perhaps because it is easier to adapt to the accordion than, say, Romantic virtuoso piano pieces. After all, a harpsichord also has two manuals,” Valkeajoki says.

“Students are given a lot of responsibility in choosing repertoire and in finding new pieces originally written for other instruments. Some people go digging deep into particular periods to find things that haven’t yet been performed on the accordion. There’s sort of a folk music vibe here: try everything to see what works and arrange music for yourself.”

Valkeajoki arranged the music for his most recent album: harpsichord works by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Although suites from the Baroque era – including those by Rameau – contain dance movements, Valkeajoki did not really give a thought to the history of his instrument in dance bands when performing them.

“Baroque dances are so different from traditional Finnish dances. Perhaps there is a distant echo of dance pavilions in there. Finnish dance music was never a particular interest of mine during my studies, but you do come across it more often on the accordion than on any other instrument. It would seem that recently classical musicians have begun to show a bit more appreciation for that historical dimension. I feel that an accordion player should have the ability to play a dance gig at a summer festival even if their speciality is Rameau or Ravel – just as any modern musician should have a command of a wide range of styles.”

A major influence in establishing the accordion as an instrument of classical music in Finland was Matti Rantanen, the first teacher of the accordion class established at the Sibelius Academy in 1977.

“Apart from Rantanen, significant musicians and teachers included Veikko Ahvenainen, Lasse Pihlajamaa and Alpo Pohja – and all the Finnish composers who began to write contemporary music for the accordion were very important too,” Markku Lepistö explains.

“It has taken a huge amount of work to get the accordion accepted into the canon of art music,” Antti Paalanen points out.

“In some ways, some of its key characteristics have been eroded. For instance, [classical musicians] try not to emphasise the use of the bellows, while in folk music it is used as a rhythmic element. On the other hand, free improvisation and experimental repertoire have proven difficult for friends of traditional accordion music to accept.”

Another important development in higher education was the establishing of academic training in folk music, which in the 1980s fostered highly original composer-performers such as Kalaniemi and Kimmo Pohjonen.

“A new approach evolved for the accordion: not classical, not popular, not folk music, but something of a merger between Finnish and international influences,” says Lepistö.

So where is the Finnish accordion today? Its historical roots as a staple of rural communities and country dances are both an asset and a liability.

“It is interesting to note that whenever people want to add something ‘organic’ to Finnish pop music, it’s almost always a violin, almost never an accordion,” says Saarenkylä.

Kalaniemi points out that ‘accordion’ is a catch-all term for a range of instruments that has never stopped evolving: there are simple accordions, chromatic accordions, the melody bass accordion, the MIDI accordion and even a microtonal accordion developed by Veli Kujala.

“It’s a living instrument that is always finding new pathways and new places. It’s at home pretty much anywhere.”

Featured photo: TSgt. William Greer (Wikimedia Commons)

Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi