Hey kids: do you like a challenge? Are you willing to stick with something that can give you a skill that increasingly few have?
If so, stick around to the end this article, we have a music lesson opportunity to share.
Hosted by the Stanley Area Historical Society, the second annual Reminiscing the Concertina event at the Stanley Community Center Saturday, August 31 drew a large crowd. Held to raise money for the renovation of the D.R. Moon Memorial Library, the event priced at $5 per person with those 14 and under getting in free saw attendance climb as the afternoon went on, reaching upwards of 60 people by 3 p.m.
With punch and refreshments also available, the event to reminisce the concertina saw lively crowd response, including dancing. The concertina is similar to an accordion, but also different in important ways. So what’s a concertina?
Glad you asked.
The concertina, a form of working class folk entertainment in the pre-radio age, derives from a region of the now German-Czech Republic border, in and about Chemitz and other cities in the German state of Saxony.
Often handmade, the instrument ranges in price from several hundred to thousands of dollars and is comprised of two ends with buttons joined by a central air chamber, or “squeezebox.” Produced in different keys, the working class instrument lost out to the accordion under communism (authorities preferred the accordion), but lived on among the generations of immigrants come from Europe to the United States, where they kept the old traditions, including concertina playing.
With songs and melodies ranging form the somber and more reverent to jovial and party centered, the concertina provides a versatile music base from which to draw and learn.
Operated in principle by pressing buttons in conjunction with moving the squeezebox, the slightest change can produce extraordinarily different sounds, hence the name.
But while playing the concertina takes skill, nature’s debt must still be paid—there are no exceptions. As such, the number of able concertina players depends on passing knowledge of the instrument and how to play it on to future generations in time.
With that in view, a new generation of Concertina players will soon be needed.
Those interested in taking concertina lessons, both from interest and to preserve the instrument’s vitality, may call Alex Kulesa at 715-613-3132. Perhaps next year, there will be more musicians, preserving the art even as nature’s debt beckons today’s masters.