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.
The inventor of the predecessor to the modern chemnitzer concertina was Carl Friedrich Uhlig. Uhlig was born in April 1789 in Chemnitz, Germany. He was an accomplished button accordion musician who constructed a small musical instrument with each side having five buttons, and each button two notes (alternating tones). He presented it as his “Accordion of a new kind” (“Accordion neuer Art”). Uhlig modeled the name on the accordion of the Viennese organ and piano builder Cyrill Demian, who acquired a patent for a new instrument in 1829.
The name accordion came to designate all instruments in which either a piano key or a button is underlaid with a chord. However, Uhlig’s instrument was not an accordion as we know it today, as the buttons on his instrument are not underlaid with chords, but with single notes. Although Uhlig’s instrument was later called the concertina, it has little to do with Charles Wheatstone’s English concertina. Unlike Uhlig’s instrument with a square case, the English concertina had a hexagonal shape and does not have alternating tones, but the same tone, whether you push or draw the bellows. To differentiate between the two, Uhlig’s instrument was later called the German concertina or the Chemnitz concertina.
Henrich Band, a music teacher and bandmaster in Germany, played one of Uhlig’s concertinas in his town band in the 1840s. By this time, Uhlig had evolved the concertina into an instrument with 28 buttons aligned in three rows for a total of 56 keys (tones).
In 1850, Carl Zimmerman from Carlsfeldt, Germany, manufactured 56-key concertinas for export to the United States. The musicians who played these instruments typically arranged their own music, and without standard sheet music available the popularity of the concertina spread very slowly.
The first chemnitzer keyboard and notation were developed in 1854 by a committee chaired by Carl Friedrich Uhlig. It is thought that the group adopted a system that was originally developed by Henrich Band in 1846.
By 1875 the chemnitzer concertina keyboard had been modified to 38 buttons or 76 keys. By extending the instrument’s range it could be used in bands as well as played solo. Gradually the keyboard was expanded to 94 keys, and by the end of the 19th century, the 102-key concertina had been developed. Eventually, the keyboard was expanded to 104 keys, and this became the most popular model of chemnitzer concertina used in the United States. Other keyboard systems, such as Albert Nechanicky’s 130-key design, are seldom used today.
The Chemnitz area in Saxony, Germany lies close to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Musicians from these countries spread the chemnitzer concertina and its music among their friends and neighbors. In the early American history of the chemnitzer, the instrument was played primarily by people with Polish, German, and Czech heritage. As these musicians moved to other parts of the country they extended the instrument’s popularity nationwide.