American Shop Selling New Quint Converters

[Walker]

Today I noticed this Youtube video of an accordion for sale by a well known shop in America. I was quite delighted that it was a beautiful Quint Converter.

Now, in my neck of the woods I rarely see new converter accordions of any system for sale in shops. It's a limited market here I guess. However, I am delighted to see an American shop selling free bass accordions with the Quint system that was once quite popular in the USA (think vintage Titano etc) and often considered an American free bass system.


The gentleman playing the accordion is a good musician. He even manages to get some music out of the Quint free bass, despite it not being a system he will be well acquainted with. Fair play to him! It's a tough gig trying to demonstrate accordions on Youtube especially when they are quite different to what you normally play.

Maybe America is re-discovering the free bass after all...

 

[debra]

I always thought that the quint convertor was most popular in America, much more so than in Europe (where most people use chromatic convertor, Richard Galliano being a rare exception). So I'm not surprised to see a Quint Convertor accordion being on offer in America.

 

[Walker]

You would think America was the home of quint but aparently not any more. I was speaking to a few people in the American accordion scene and was surprised to here that stradella bass is really the only show in town. Seems the heyday of Giulietti chromatic bassetti and Titano Palmer & Hughes (quint) converters is long gone. However, I have seen a few new chromatic converters sold in this famous shop in the past year or two but this Scandalli is actually the first new quint free bass I have ever seen there! Maybe, the first buds of a new accordion spring are growing...

Honestly, I think Italy is by a long way the world centre of quint converter these days and it perhaps always was. Salvatore di Gesualdo is often considered the father of fisarmonica classica, and aparently played Bach's Art of Fugue, note for note, on quint converter. In fact, there are many conservatoires in Italy where the head accordion teacher is a piano accordionist with quint converter. Certainly, many think of Galliano as being perhaps the most famous accordionist in the world, and who just happens to play quint, but actually the likes of Ivano Battiston, Riccardo Centazzo, Francesco Palazzo, Mergherita Berlanda, Ivano Biscardi and Sir N. Antonio Peruch are just a few of the many great Italian classical accordionists who play quint. I think right now Italy is one of the main countries in Europe for free bass accordion especially for quint and chromatic C system.

 

[saundersbp]

Sir N. Antonio Peruch

This made me howl with laughter, a character from Little Britain perhaps? Actually you get the same with Italian organists, lots of semi apocryphal titles and comic aggrandisement. Wonderful stuff, we need more!


Galliano is a great accordionist, hardly a household name, but then is any accordionist? What I do notice about him is what he doesn't tend to play too much - freebass classical repertoire, not for instance Bach that isn't an arrangement or mash up with other instruments. That's not to detract from superlative musicality of course which is ever present in whatever he plays.

 

[Tom]

Huhhhh????? Is that Galliano ? Only household name around here is Al and he's weird.

 

[Walker]

It must be a hard old game being a classical accordionist. All the work and little in the way of recognition. Still, at least they have the enjoyment of making sublime music.

For me, Galliano doesn't push hard on the free bass unless it's absolutely necessary. What I find most interesting about him is that he was content to play a 120 bass quint converter which sets his free bass at 3 octaves before switching register for a 4th octave. That's not a massive range. However, I suspect the great musician knows well that this is not really a big limitation for him. Certainly, even I can take a brief glance through Bach's non instrument specific clavier music, such as the French Suites, the complete Well Tempered Clavier and even studies like Two Part Inventions, and see they are almost entirely (like 99.999% ) within the range of Galliano's bass, which has a starting low note of C2. Indeed, Bach, whose compositional genius was to music what William Shakespeare's words were to the English language, is at one with the essence of music and happy to stay within a compact range of notes, very rarely straying into octave 1. I guess Bach saved the super grand stuff for the organ works!

But as much as Galliano doesn't show off with his free bass, sometimes, just sometimes he treats us to a work of great free bass beauty. As the saying goes, talent does what it can, genius does what it must, here's another Bach masterpiece, the Cello Suite, played on Galliano's vintage quint free bass.

 

[Siegmund]

I always thought that the quint convertor was most popular in America, much more so than in Europe (where most people use chromatic convertor, Richard Galliano being a rare exception).

"Most popular" is a relative term. Even if the US was once 99% Stradella, 0.7% quint, and 0.3% chromatic freebass, I am not sure if we ever had the majority of the world's quint players. I would guess that today there are more chromatic than quint players in the US, just because we have some number of immigrant virtuosi who bring their instruments with them, and very few pushing quint. You can count the number of freebass instruments that Liberty Bellows showcases in a year on your fingers, probably the fingers of one hand.

I find most interesting about him is that he was content to play a 120 bass quint converter which sets his free bass at 3 octaves before switching register for a 4th octave. That's not a massive range.

For anything except piano, that is a massive range, almost impossibly massive. The cello and the bassoon can just barely manage 4 octaves (and getting the 4th octave requires doing things with your hand and lip that are a whole lot harder than pushing a register switch.) Richard Strauss once asked for 4 from the violin, but even 3½ gets you into "just squeaks" territory. Clarinet can manage 3½, but flute and horn are about 3, trumpet trombone and oboe about 2½. Only the biggest organs have more than 2 octaves of pedals. All of those ranges require some considerable technical skill to get the extreme notes - for amateur/school ensembles you better keep your strings and clarinets to 2½ and everything else to 2. And none of those instruments has anything like a uniform timbre across its whole range.

To me the choice between quint and chromatic has very little to do with range, a lot to do with whether you want things with a lot of accidentals to be easy to play and whether you want more than 2 rows of buttons. The range limitation really only comes into play if you want both hands playing in the stratosphere at the same time.

 

[debra]

...
For anything except piano, that is a massive range, almost impossibly massive. The cello and the bassoon can just barely manage 4 octaves (and getting the 4th octave requires doing things with your hand and lip that are a whole lot harder than pushing a register switch.) ...

It's all relative. 4 octaves is 48 notes. I play only one accordion with fewer notes than that (46 notes). My other accordions have 52, 56 and 64 notes. And that is not including extra octaves you can get through switches. It is surprising how fast you get used to having many notes (and actually making use of them too). For me a standard 41 key piano accordion is a "small accordion" and when I make arrangements for accordion ensemble I often have to jump through hoops to make an arrangement fit within that limited range of notes.

 

[Walker]

For the accordion ensemble, with its focus generally only on the treble keyboard, having a useable range of E1 to C#8, makes a large button accordion very useful for low notes.

However, even the 41 key Scandalli displayed above can be seen to have an excellent range of notes, when simply played using both hands on the two keyboards. C2 to A7 is a pretty good flow of notes when considered in this way. To me, having read Siegmund's analysis, I think of this accordion range like a combination of cello on the left hand blending into violin on the right.

However, the largest piano and button accordions typically dip well into the 1st octave on the bass (C1 or E1) and peak at C#8 on the treble. I sometimes wonder if such gigantic instruments are really the best way for the accordion to develop. I would love to hear better sounding accordions with a slightly smaller range of notes than something that vaguely echos a church organ, including thunderous pedal notes. Having some limitations is kind of normal, isn't it?

 

[saundersbp]

I would love to hear better sounding accordions with a slightly smaller range of notes

Agreed. And I'd take it further and get rid of multiple reed banks, reducing cost and weight and focus on the quality of a single reed. Would anyone buy such an instrument or are we too brainwashed into quantity over quality in 2022?

 

[Walker]

Ben, share the specs... How many notes on treble and bass? How many voices? What's essential for a slimline classical design?

 

[saundersbp]

Ben, share the specs... How many notes on treble and bass? How many voices? What's essential for a slimline classical design?

Ok, in notation speak C4 is middle C, the numbers always relate to C
Compass:
Rh C3 to A6, just under 4 octaves
LH A1 to E5, just under 4 octaves
That enables you to play the vast bulk of classical repertoire.

Voices:
1 only for Rh and Lh, i.e. no register switches, no converter. That gets you the cheapest and lightest accordion for slimline classical design. Also both voices matched, no cassotto and turning to your original point (which I agree with), both Lh and Rh voices of exquisite quality. I've played very expensive modern accordions where the cassotto voice is not as mellow or musical as the best 1970s instrument without cassotto. Therefore something has been lost in the manufacturing process and at the top end of the market we have massive accordions with a silly number of registers and voices adding to weight and cost, but as you say, something is lost in musical quality. Probably because materials are now cheaper to make something bigger than the human labour to make something of fantastic quality.

In pipe organs in the UK this happened around 1870ish. When you are looking for the best organs to restore to look for pre late Victorian as the economy changed between labour and materials balance. There are reports of an organ voicer taking a month to perfect one voice of a small organ in the eighteenth century. Nowadays you'd allow a day maximum. Human labour is so much more expensive Vs materials in 2022.

 

[Walker]

Fantastic balance to this design! An instrument compass of A1 to A6, giving 5 octaves plus 1 semitone, or 61 notes in total. With 44 notes to the bass and 46 notes to the treble, and a single voice either side of the bellows, it's a perfect instrument for Bach's clavier music. No cassotto would give a clear and homogenous tone.

It could work for either a button accordion or a piano accordion. With solely a melody bass, would you select slightly larger buttons? Would you arrange the bass chromatically over 3 rows or 4 rows (with repeated notes)? Would you step the bass for ease of thumb use?

Great design, light too!

 

[Neil Thornock]

Ben, sounds like a huge concertina!

As to quint freebass: I'd love one. As a composer, there's a lot to be attracted to.

 

[Walker]

As to quint freebass: I'd love one. As a composer, there's a lot to be attracted to

I'm glad it's not just me who likes quint! I like to tell everyone it's the quint-essential accordion. From the feedback I have received, it seems the joke is wearing thin, painfully thin.