A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHEMNITZER CONCERTINA
Concertina Music has assembled this very brief history of the chemnitzer concertina from several knowledgeable and credible sources.
Carl Friedrich Uhlig of Chemnitz, Germany, is credited with creating the forerunner of the modern Chemnitzer concertina. Born in April 1789 and trained as a button accordion player, he built a compact square instrument with five buttons on each side, each button sounding two alternating notes, which he introduced as his “accordion of a new kind,” inspired by the earlier accordion patented by Viennese builder Cyrill Demian in 1829.
Although the word “accordion” soon came to describe instruments where each key or button controlled a chord, Uhlig’s design was different because every button produced single notes rather than chords. His square concertina later became known as the German or Chemnitz concertina and is distinct from Charles Wheatstone’s hexagonal English concertina, whose buttons sound the same note on both push and pull of the bellows.
By the 1840s, music teacher and bandleader Henrich Band was performing on one of Uhlig’s concertinas, at a time when the instrument had evolved to 28 buttons arranged in three rows for a total of 56 tones. Around 1850, Carl Zimmermann of Carlsfeld, Germany, began building 56–key concertinas for export to the United States, where early players generally arranged their own music, so the instrument’s popularity grew slowly without standardized sheet music.
In 1854, a committee chaired by Uhlig created the first Chemnitzer concertina keyboard and notation system, likely adopting ideas first developed by Henrich Band in 1846. By 1875, the keyboard had been expanded to 38 buttons (76 keys), extending the range so the concertina could serve both as a band instrument and a solo voice, and by the late 19th century larger 94–, 102–, and eventually 104–key instruments appeared, with the 104–key layout becoming the most common Chemnitzer system in the United States.
The Chemnitz region of Saxony lies close to Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, and traveling musicians from these neighboring areas helped spread both the instrument and its music among their communities. In the United States, the Chemnitzer concertina took root especially among people of Polish, German, and Czech heritage, who carried the instrument with them as they moved across the country and shared it with new audiences.