Benedetti, Héctor. 2017. Nueva historia del tango: De los orígenes al siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. p. 47-48
This is an unauthorized translation of two pages from the book.
The bandoneon, “the folding box”
No one can deny that the musical instrument that represents tango is the bandoneon. Our ear immediately associates its sound with tango music, and, by extension, with the city and urban life. Although in Argentina the instrument had been well-known since the second half of the 19th century, it began to be popularized as the characteristic instrument of the genre more recently, with the development of the orquesta típica. The instrument lent to the new orquestas a timbre that, from that point on, would become indispensable. It was a curious destiny for a wind instrument whose original purpose, apparently, was to accompany Lutheran services in the Rhineland.
The bandoneon was born out of the need to perfect an earlier instrument: the concertina. There were two types of concertina, which were similar and which had parallel histories: one German and one English. The designs of these were based in turn on the simpler instruments that had preceded them. The German concertina was created by the luthier Carl Friedrich Uhlig, whose goal was to make a substitute for the harmonium [a small organ], that would be portable. The new instrument was first introduced in 1834, and it reappeared in a more developed form 20 years later. As for the English type, it owed its existence to the maker Charles Wheatstone. It was patented in 1829, and 15 years later was reintroduced with an improved design.
Both the German and English concertinas were instruments that had a ‘free reed’ or ‘tongue’ and worked using a bellows, with buttons or keys on both sides that moved in the same direction as the movement of the bellows. This was the notable feature that distinguished them from the accordion, whose keys, when they were pressed down, moved in a direction perpendicular to the bellows. The buttons of the concertinas were arranged on wooden cases whose forms went through various modifications (octagonal, hexagonal, square), and the number of tones produced varied widely between the different models of each type. In the German type, when the bellows were stretched or compressed, the keys would produce different sounds (in other words, they were bisonoric keys); while in the English type, there was one unique sound for each button, regardless of whether the bellows were being opened or closed.
The concertina that evolved into the bandoneon was the German type. The music teacher Heinrich Band began a series of redesigns to it in about 1840. He chose the square case, or box, as the standard, and arranged the buttons in a different way, giving this new instrument the name of “bandonion.” The number of tones varied between 56 (28 buttons) and 130 (65 buttons), depending on the model. Later, the model adopted by tango musicians would have 71 buttons and 142 tones, which became the “standard” bandoneon for the genre.
Photo: Juan Maglio “Pacho” and his bandoneon. Publicity photo from the 1910’s.
