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This chapter introduces a method of marking up a short Gelfand-Tsetlin pattern based on inequalities between its entries, that encodes the effect of the involution t 7 → t′ and the boxing and circling of its accordion. This will have another benefit: it will lead to the decomposition of the pattern into pieces called episodes that will ultimately lead to the reduction to the totally resonant case. The proof is easily checked using standard properties of Gauss sums. To define the cartoon, the chapter takes a slightly more formal approach to the short Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns. The vertices of the cartoon will be the elements of the substrate Θ‎, and the edges must be defined.

This chapter introduces the theorem that says Statement E implies Statement D, first by fixing a nodal signature η‎ and presenting a “cut and paste” virtual resotope. It then presents the proof, whereby α‎ ∈, CPsubscript Greek small letter eta(c₀, · · ·,csubscript d) and let σ‎ = θ‎(α‎,η‎). The chapter proceeds by extending the function GΓ‎ from the set of decorated Γ‎-accordions to the free abelian group by linearity. Also the involution on decorated accordions induces an isomorphism. The relevant equation is obtained using the principle of inclusion-exclusion.

This chapter deals with Λ‎subscript Greek capital letter gamma and Λ‎subscript Greek capital letter delta, and Statement G. It begins by introducing a nodal signature, denoted by η‎, and a subsignature, denoted by σ‎. It then presents the proof, using the signature σ‎ to determine the rules for boxing and circling in α‎. While the circling in the accordion strictly speaking occurs at α‎ᵢ and β‎subscript i plus 1, we may equivalently consider it to occur at α‎ᵢ and β‎ᵢ for bookkeeping purposes. The chapter also considers the condition when the alternating sum for Λ‎subscript Greek capital letter gamma will only contain nonzero contributions from subsignatures.

This chapter focuses on the language of resotopes and assumes that γ‎Lsubscript Greek small letter epsilon and γ‎Rsubscript Greek small letter epsilon are multiples of n for every totally resonant episode. It also recalls that s and d are the weights of the accordions under consideration. It begins with the proposition that Statement D is equivalent to Statement C, and that Statement D is true if n ≠ s. It then describes the case of a totally resonant short Gelfand-Tsetlin pattern before presenting the proof that Statement D implies Statement B. It shows that the reduction to Statement D is straightforward for Class I, but each of the remaining classes involves some nuances.

This Introduction situates historically the Cajun community’s position within the broader cultural currents of the United States. The evolution of Cajun instrumentation, the earliest influences acting on the genre—including minstrelsy, showboats, and travelling entertainment—frame this Introduction to Cajun music’s pre-commercial history. This chapter argues that interaction, not isolation, attributed to the vibrancy of Cajun music

This chapter examines the dawn of Cajun recording. The Cajun community’s relationship to recording technology, the evolving nature of America’s recording industry, and Cajun music’s relationship to the ethnic, race, and hillbilly markets, are examined to illustrate the cultural intersections between the Bayou Country and America writ large. The pioneering recording careers of Joe Falcon, Cleoma Breaux Falcon, and Leo Soileau are also offered as further examples of the recording industry’s impact on local traditions and perceptions of Cajun music.

This chapter presents accordion jokes and considers the reasons why accordions and accordion players are mocked. It suggests that sociological factors must have played the dominant role in assigning the accordion to the realm of despised instruments. Indeed, from its invention in the nineteenth century, the accordion never attained the respect of the elite class. It was a clever mechanical musical gadget. The accordion fad was in tune with the later nineteenth century's fascination with mechanization. Lacking a venerable pedigree, the accordion caught on among the less well-heeled part of the emerging middle class and the more plebeian working classes, and the instrument certainly was never accepted as a peer of the established classical orchestral instruments.

This chapter traces some diverse aspects of the accordion's current popularity that have yet to come to light: the San Francisco neo-vaudeville scene; the accordion festival phenomenon with its emphasis on the ludic, participatory aspects of accordion playing; and Internet-based accordion communities. It explores the rise of festivals and organizations, which became focal points for diversity and provided the accordion scene with a core identity. The chapter also considers a renewed interest in learning to play folk and traditional music, workshop participation, and accordion collecting and the material culture of the accordion. The chapter concludes with reflections on the cultural work the accordion has been doing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—embracing the idea of “difference” and recapturing genres, cultures, and repertoires that were previously marginalized in the accordion world.

This chapter examines the accordion culture along the south shore of Lake Superior. From the late nineteenth century through the present, the accordion has reigned in the area as the most ubiquitous and emblematic folk-musical instrument. A downright working-class instrument, it fostered egalitarian social relations and interethnic alliances—a kind of alliance only possible in the New World, where the politics of ethnic identity has come to govern many social relations. The chapter focuses in the following: (1) how South Shore musicians acquired and learned to play assorted accordions; (2) the audiences for whom and contexts within which they performed; and (3) the sources and nature of their repertoires. The resulting cumulative historical and ethnographic portrait illuminates the accordion's significant role in establishing a common, creolized, regional, and enduring working-class culture that was substantially formed between the 1890s and the 1930s.

This chapter tells of a moment when the artistic value of the accordion came into greater focus. From conservatories to concert halls to competition stages, the absence of the accordion was touted as evidence of injustice. What's more, the improvement of the accordion's repertoire, pedagogy, and physical construction were prescribed as an urgent undertaking—and as vital contributions to the elevation of American cultural sensibilities. This chapter discusses the work of some of the accordion's most outstanding midcentury practitioners and promoters and the importance of innovations such as the free-bass converter system—the accordion's bid to be recognized not only as a legitimate instrument but an artist's instrument, worthy of the concert hall. It then concludes with a profile of Guido Deiro's younger brother Pietro Deiro (1888–1954), the self-described “Daddy of the Accordion.”

This concluding chapter charts the relationships between all the different communities, regions, and phases of the accordion's life discussed so far, exploring common threads and disjunctions throughout history. It moves the study of the accordion away from the traditional subdiscipline of organology and attempts to say something about the processes through which instruments evolve. Musical instruments entail a great deal of disjunctions between the makers, individuals, institutions, and ideas that shape them at different phases in their history. This chapter offers a perspective on the very breadth of variables involved in all the repertoires, practices, and ideas of accordionists, which enables us to see, among all the variables, continuity and harmony among different sectors of the accordion world.

This introductory chapter discusses the cultural and historical significance of the accordion as an instrument and as a musical movement. It considers how accordionists and bands with accordions symbolized an appealing and popular manifestation of alternative musical cultures in the postpunk area. Here, the chapter delves into the author's own experiences with the accordion movement, before turning to a brief historical analysis of the history and documentation of musical instruments as tools for making culture. In addition, the chapter provides an overview of the particular instrument under study—the piano accordion. It is a chromatic, bellows-driven, free-reed instrument that produces multiple chord tones with buttons on the left side manual and a piano keyboard on the right.

This chapter explores the history of the Creole accordion. Black Creoles in Louisiana have created their own, distinctive accordion music adapted from French, Native American, and African cultures. While Creole musicians in the early twentieth century were often hired for Cajun dances, where they played Cajun dance music, at their own gatherings they played a uniquely Creole repertoire that drew from the African American blues—a repertoire later developed by accordionists such Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis. Zydeco, as this music eventually was labeled, has become a symbol of Louisiana Creole culture. It is argued that despite the pressure on modern zydeco bands to adapt to the demands of the music industry, the traditional accordion and rubboard remain the core instruments, and zydeco accordionists keep playing in a distinctively Creole style.

This chapter looks at the emergence of accordion schools and accordion bands in the United States established by Italian Americans. Approaching the subject from the perspective of grassroots oral history and performance theory, it maps the ways in which the efforts of Roxy and Nellie Caccamise (pioneers of the piano accordion in upstate New York) were connected to a longer history and larger matrix of Italian American musicians, composers, publishing houses, and manufacturers in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. The chapter also suggests how the interactions and interplay of peoples within, and through, these community-based networks functioned to create a parallel economy and a cultural space that was not only imbricated in the politics of identity but helped span gaps between folk and fame. Taking an actor/action-centered approach to life-history narratives, it suggests that the accordion schools created by Italian Americans operated through the interstices of two cultures and proved to be a strategic intervention in American cultural life with polysemous meanings.

Ethnographic focus on identifying shared cultural practice often obscures the fact that many times such choices result from individual desire and taste. This chapter illustrates the importance of such personal choices and explores a means for including individuality in an explanation of shared cultural practice, similar in some ways to what the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has called “the ethnography of the particular.” Despite variations in performance practices, O'odham listeners uniformly value waila because it connects them to each other and “makes them happy.” The focus on how and why waila musicians play the accordion the way they do show how the music also links O'odham to non-O'odham and to much wider social, musical, and even economic circles. Yet even as waila musicians engage with the non-O'odham world, they simultaneously hold it at bay.

This chapter traces the accordion's history from its arrival at Colombia's Atlantic shores to its ubiquitous presence in popular vallenato music. Accordions and harmonicas were assimilated into local musical culture as early as the 1860s, combined with scrapers or other rhythm and percussion instruments, such as the triangle and side drum. Trading routes along the main rivers into the interior of the country allowed for the dispersion of accordions and their music during the economic boom in the tobacco-, banana-, and coffee-growing zones. With vallenato's increasing national popularity in the mid-1980s, the accordion, which was firmly rooted in the lower strata, needed a new social veneer. Soap-opera actor and vallenato accordionist and singer Carlos Vives' international success in the mid-1990s reached a level of visibility that validated the music, despite vallenato's infamous and unbroken connection with the Colombian mafia.

John K. Gianaros was a professional musician and recording artist who performed with some of the most notable Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Albanian and Sephardic musicians of his generation. Over his long career he was a musician, composer, and record producer whose work not only crossed ethnic boundaries but also public venues. Gianaros was known for his proficiency on the accordion and his long collaboration with clarinetist Gus Gadinis.

In her conclusion, the author asks what kind of ethical future we can hope for when so many bodies are threatened. What good does reading do anyone? Throughout Racial Immanence, the author argues for reading as an intra-action of body and text. Granting the immanence of race reconfigures the space and time of reading and writing; it posits both as world-making performances that reimagine the social. Reading, the author argues, is the most resistant, punk rock thing we can do, an argument she makes by historicizing punk as a mode of affective, anti-colonial resistance whose genesis she locates in the nineteenth-century diary of a Mexican soldier whose sentiment mirrors contemporary Chicanx punk music. These filiations embody the book’s argument by insisting on a materiality energized by a racial immanence that comes together in fleeting, performative moments of chicanidad.