Bandoneón - seen, spelled, pronounced, and played

A few weeks ago I was chatting to someone about my dancing flower and joking that I might make it a little bandoneón instead of the guitar; that being a characteristic instrument of tango. [Image: Wikimedia, attributed under Creative Commons 2.0]

During the conversation it appeared that although my friend had been dancing tango for some years, approaching it via other dances, he had never actually seen a bandoneón, and thought it was shaped like an accordion - or perhaps even that it was the same thing.

There are things that people who know them often suppose, without any justification, that everyone knows. In this case, what a bandoneón is, and such necessary trivialities as what you are meant to do with the little ´ above the ó. I don't remember how or when I learned what a bandoneón was, but I know it took a while. So this is a "things I wish I'd been told" post; and it's also a little bit for my Dad, who is doing a distance-learning course in advanced Spanish, and is encountering wild assertions about the history of tango in his course materials.

Tangos are sometimes played on accordions; for example this is what Mazaika do. But the sound and the possibilities are different.

The bandoneón is a bellows instrument, square in cross-section. It has two voices, a high one played by the right hand and a low one played by the left hand. There are keys in the form of buttons at each end, and each key produces a different note depending on whether the instrument is breathing in or out. So it has, in effect, four keyboards, laid out to facilitate the playing of chords rather than scales.

To me, it seems a bit like a pocket pipe organ, and just one can produce an amazing quantity and quality of sound. Here, Klaus Gutjahr plays a Prelude and Fugue in C Major by J. S. Bach. The silent guitarist is Jörg Utesch and together they are Duo Opal (website plays music). I linked to this video to make a point in a previous post, but I think it deserves embedding.



The sound is a bit unusual, to a tango dancer; it's a new instrument, I suppose, and it's in a church. But it illustrates one of the things it can do. I'll post a different one lower down.

I find it fascinating to watch, because of the way the instrument breathes. They were invented in Germany, and it seems that new ones are still made only or mainly there; Klaus Gutjahr also makes them. There is a potted history here and another here. Learning to play one, at least as an adult, is widely regarded as a job for loonspuds deluxe (Yahoo group). The Wikipedia article has some pictures of the inside and a brief technical description.

If you want to spell "bandoneón" correctly you'll usually find on Windows at least that CTRL+ALT+o does the trick. Of course some people don't write the ó in an English sentence, but it helps with the pronunciation so I prefer to leave it in.

As for pronunciation, bandoneón is the name it ended up with in Spanish, and it's useful to know that the pronunciation of Spanish is, as they say in my Spanish-English dictionary, "adequately represented by its spelling", so if you simply sound it out letter by letter, you'll be more or less in the right place. The e is like the e in egg. Spanish has fewer different vowel sounds than English, and e is always pretty much like the e in egg. And a is always like in and, and o is always like o in on. Then there's a stress-marker on the last o, ó, so that means you say band-on-e-ON, and not, for example, band-ON-eon or bando-NEon. Where you put the stress is quite important, just as it is in English. If you put it in the wrong place, people may not know what you're trying to say. [Edit: or you might make an informed decision to treat it as a German word, since they use the same one, and choose to pronounce it the German way, which is probably easier if your native language is English - see Comments. But in that case, you should write o and not ó.][And there's more: in response to Andreas's comment, Simba has done some research on the etym(yth)ology of the name; so far, the name seems to be original, and not derived from 'Band Union', but he would like your input if you have access to certain books. Isn't it good when the Comments get going?]

And here's a bandoneón playing tango. You'll notice a long passage of right-hand only. Roberto Álvarez and Color Tango. This instrument is unlikely to be new.