Photo: Ryan Caron King/Connecticut Public Radio.
Accordions on display at the New England Accordion Connection & Museum Company in North Canaan, Connecticut. The museum has over 500 on display, and is one of two accordion museums in the country.
After reading at Connecticut Public Radio about an accordion museum, I thought about how many different associations I have with these instruments.
I think of strolling troubadours at romantic restaurants. I think of my Wisconsin relatives and how they always get the band at weddings to play a polka. And I think of a Massachusetts novelist who made the accordion practically a character in her book Hoopi Shoopi Donna.
Would love to hear what the word “accordion” makes you think of.
Lori Mack writes, “Walk into North Canaan’s historic railroad station, and you’ll see hundreds of accordions stacked floor to ceiling. It’s a wall of gleaming buttons, piano keys, mother-of-pearl, rhinestones, and chrome.
“That’s where you’ll find Paul Ramunni.
“He’s curator and owner of the New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company, a space devoted not just to instruments, but to the stories they carry. …
“Long dismissed as ‘corny’ because of its ties to polka music, the accordion has often been the butt of jokes. Ramunni played through his teenage years, but stopped when he went to college. Then, decades later, something unexpected brought him back.
“ ‘Forty-two years later … I woke up in Vermont and had the urge to play again,’ he said.
“A single phone call led him to a nearby seller with a collection of accordions — and concertinas said to have come from Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp.
“ ‘That was the moment that changed things for me,’ Ramunni said.
“At the time, he was working as an accountant. But collecting instruments soon became something more.
“ ‘I thought I was collecting accordions,’ he said. ‘And then I realized I was saving the stories.’
“Many of those stories are rooted in war, migration and survival.
“One begins in Nazi Germany, with a young accordion prodigy named Rosemarie Molitor. According to Ramunni, she was asked to perform at Nazi dinner parties. She refused. As punishment, her father was forced to drive trucks loaded with explosives to the front lines. But the family survived the war.
“Years later, relatives brought Molitor’s accordions to Ramunni’s museum. He asked when Molitor died, and was surprised by the answer.
“ ‘She hasn’t passed,’ they told him.
“Molitor, who was in her 90s and living in California, spoke with Ramunni over FaceTime. …
“Other instruments in the collection carry their own histories: One was used to entertain Al Capone in the 1930s, another belonged to television host Lawrence Welk, and one was played for more than 225,000 troops during World War II.
“But the museum isn’t just about the past. The accordion still has the power to connect people, Ramunni says.
“He remembers two orchestral musicians who stopped by while in the area for another event. Neither had ever played the instrument. One was a bassoonist, the other a clarinetist.
“Ramunni brought them into a back room and handed them an accordion. Within minutes, he said, they were laughing like children — giggling, playing, completely absorbed.
“Afterward, he asked where they were from. One was from Iran. The other, Israel. The musician from Iran told him they had only met a week earlier.
“ ‘A bond developed over the music,’ the bassoonist told Ramunni. ‘And we agreed we would never let anything come between us that would hurt that bond or destroy it.’
“For Ramunni, that moment captured what the accordion represents: Not just that it can make music, but that music brings people together.
“That sense of discovery played out again that day when a man driving through town with his family spotted the sign for the museum and pulled in.
“ ‘I don’t know how to play one — I think they’re cool, though,’ said Alex Beardsley of Prospect. …
“Nearby, Ramunni showed a 5-year-old boy how the instrument works, opening the bellows as spirited music filled the room. The sound rose and fell, lifting into something playful and alive.
“On the back of his business card, Ramunni sums up accordions this way:
“ ‘They each have their own special voice, characteristics, flaws, and beauty. I guess in a way the same could be said of each of us.’ ”
More at GBH, here.
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