L'Italo-Americano

LIFE PEOPLE PLACES HERITAGE M usic is the most talented of painters: every note has a color and each of their declensions is just a different shade of it. When they come together, it's like mixing pig- ments on a palette, textures and hues developing, blossoming and playing with one another. Music is infinite and it belongs to infinity: there is no end to the feelings it can evoke and to the memories it can cre- ate. Each instrument becomes a voice that whispers tales of won- der and beauty, a voice reminisc- ing about loves we left behind, times of happiness or pain, moments of joy, reflection, emo- tions. Among the musical instru- ments, accordions have a special place, because the music they make has a magic all of its own: some call them "boxes of the wind" while others, even more poetically, like to say they are "boxes of the soul." These instru- ments evoke images of a time made of country fairs and sum- mer dances, those where our grandfathers probably courted our grandmothers and where they may have exchanged their first kiss. We of L'Italo Americano had the luck to chat about these mag- ical instruments with one of Italy's historical accordion mak- ers, Massimo Castagnari. Locat- ed in charming Recanati (Marche), the town universally known for being home to great Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, the Castagnari atelier started pro- ducing accordions more than a century ago, in 1914, and it keeps on with this tradition by making instruments of immense beauty and, above all, great qual- ity. Castagnari, in fact, tells us his family's love for accordions started earlier than the date of their atelier's creation: "our his- tory starts even further back than 1914 because, actually, our grandfather Giacomo Castagnari, the founder of our company, entered Filippo Guzzini's work- shop when he was 7 or 8 years old. Guzzini, our grandfather's teacher, is also our maternal great grandfather." There is so much about accordions that we already know, just because we know the type of music they make, yet there is even more to discover. For instance, not many may be aware of the fact they are a relatively new musical instrument, as they were invented in Austria in 1829 by a piano and organ maker from Vienna, Cyrill Demian. He called his new instrument "accordion" but today we would call it a melodeon, fisarmonica diatonica in Italian, because each key can produce two different notes, as Castagnari explains: "melodeons, which in Italy we call familiarly organetti, are bisonoric instruments: this means that the same button can produce two different notes, depending on whether the bel- lows are opening or closing." This makes them different from accordions (or fisarmonica in Italian), also because melodeons "have smaller dimensions, which makes of them a much easier to handle, more dynamic instru- ment." The Castagnari family busi- ness bears witness to the evident ties between organetti and fisar- moniche and the Bel Paese, a tie that certainly began in the early years of the instrument's diffu- sion, if we take 1829 as its date of birth and consider how Giaco- mo Castagnari learned the craft when he was a child, in the already established atelier of his future father in law, Filippo Guzzini. In fact, some say the accordion as we know it today was a wholly Italian affair, either because it was an Italian, Paolo Soprani, who perfected Demian's work, or because it was an Italian to invent it in the first place. This theory was proposed in the 1980s by La Nazione's journalist Ottorino Guerrieri and said that it CHIARA D'ALESSIO Making accordions is part craft, part art . Photo courtesy: Castagnari The sound of tradition: Castagnari and the history of their accordions THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 2019 www.italoamericano.org 22 L'Italo-Americano Castagnari has been making accordions in Recanati for generations. Photo courtesy: Castagnari Continued to page 24

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