More Squeezing, Less Wheezing (or: Ireland’s Smoking Ban Means Better Accordion Sounds)

If you have to smoke, do it outside. Do it for the accordions.

My Smokiest Accordion

Back in 2004, when Wendy still lived in Boston, she overheard the bus driver talking to a friend.

“What am I going to do with my Dad’s old accordion? I should just give it away, but I have no idea how to do that,” she said.

Wendy had a word with the bus driver, and a week later, they met at a Dunkin’ Donuts, where the bus driver brought her the accordion in a large black garbage bag. “It must’ve looked like some mobster deal,” she told me.

I came to visit Wendy a week later and tried out the accordion. On the first squeeze, a cloud of dust belched from its vents, and the room was filled with what must have been twenty years’ worth of cigarette smoke. When I took it home and took it apart, I managed to shop-vac out a lot of cigarette ash and remove a fair bit of sticky cigarette tar from the reeds. There’s a fair bit more cigarette-related damage that needs to be fixed, but the work involved is complex enough that I’m going to leave that to my main accordion repair guy, Joe Caringi, to handle.

Ireland’s Cleaner Accordions

I remember the days before the smoking ban here in Accordion City. As a young single guy, I’d come home from a night out on the town with my clothes reeking of smoke. Bad as smoke is for clothing, it’s worse for bellows instruments, which suck up lots of the surrounding air as they’re played.

Ireland has a long tradition of mixing accordion playing with carousing at the local pub, and their 2004 smoking ban has turned up an unexpected benefit: in addition to improving the air quality in pubs, it’s also improved the music quality:

Doctors at Dublin’s St. Vincent’s Hospital carried out a survey of people involved in the cleaning, repair, maintenance and renovation of accordions.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, John Garvey and colleagues said they wanted to check the impact of the smoking ban on the quality of traditional Irish music played in the smoke-free pubs.

They managed to contact six of the seven Irish experts who work with the instruments.

All said there was a strong smell of cigarette smoke from accordions played in a smoke-filled environment when they were opened. Soot-like dirt was deposited throughout the instrument.

One repairer commented that the deposition of dirt could be substantial enough to affect the pitch of the reed. Two others claimed that if a musician tended to play in a particular key, that this could be determined from the distribution of dirt around particular reeds.

All the repairers were categorical that these signs had definitely improved in accordions they had worked on since the introduction of the smoking ban in Ireland.

The doctors concluded the smoking ban has been “music to the ears of the people of Ireland.”

There you have it: another reason to quit smoking!

(And for those who doubt the deleterious effects of second-hand smoke, this should be your wake-up call. Fixing an accordion’s second-hand smoke damage is hard enough; fixing a lung’s smoke damage is much, much harder.)

[Thanks to Rahul for letting me know about this!]