The Concertina and Portuguese Folk Music

In Portuguese folk music, the concertina is the name given to a small diatonic button accordion that became the instrument par excellence of the festivals, pilgrimages and dances of the north of the country. Although the name was inherited from the hexagonal instrument patented by the Englishman Charles Wheatstone in 1829, the Portuguese concertina belongs to another family: it is a free-reed aerophone, with two — sometimes two and a half or three — rows of buttons, originally known as a harmónio or two-row harmónico. It was popular tradition that fixed upon it the name concertina, today all but universal.

A free-reed bellows aerophone

The sound is born of air forced by the bellows over metal tongues that vibrate freely — the same principle as the accordion, the harmonica and the harmonium. The defining trait of the concertina is its diatonic and bisonoric character: each button produces two distinct notes depending on whether the bellows opens or closes. From this alternation arises a rhythmic swing all its own, lively and emphatic, perfectly suited to the instrument’s primary purpose — to make people dance.

The popular models are generally arranged in two rows tuned to neighbouring keys, which allows the player to slide between scales and improvise accompaniments with limited means. It is a portable, robust and resonant instrument, qualities that explain the speed with which it replaced the older handcrafted instruments in the role of dance music.

Arrival in Portugal and rooting in the North

These diatonic accordions arrived in Portugal in the second half of the nineteenth century and, over the following decades, gradually took the place of the old flutes, pipes, violas and ferrinhos in the animation of dances. Some associate their rise with the return of soldiers from the First World War, but it was above all village life that adopted them. Although the whole country knew it, it was on the Atlantic strip of the Northwest — and in particular in the Minho — that the concertina put down the deepest roots, becoming an obligatory presence in folk ensembles, in the festivals of the popular saints and in the great pilgrimages, such as the Pilgrimage of Nossa Senhora da Agonia, in Viana do Castelo.

The concertina is a singular case of adoption: an instrument of industrial manufacture and foreign origin, it was so completely absorbed by the people of the Minho that it came to be felt as the very voice of the land.

The Minho emigration of the mid-twentieth century scattered the concertina across the Portuguese communities of Europe, the Americas and Africa, where it continues to mark celebrations and gatherings, making it one of the sonic emblems of the diaspora.

Dances, desgarradas and the popular repertoire

The natural territory of the concertina is the dance and the singing of challenge. It accompanies viras, chulas, malhões and cananas, but it is above all in the desgarrada, or singing of challenge, that it reveals its full role: two or more singers improvise verses, provoke and answer one another, while the concertina player sustains the beat and marks the pauses in which the wit of the reply must land. This art of improvisation brings the concertina close to other living expressions of Portuguese intangible cultural heritage, in which music is made in the moment and in community.

Since the mid-1990s there has been a strong revival of interest in the concertina, a movement that began in the North and then spread throughout the country, with new generations of players, competitions and festivals. This revivalism gave new life to the instrument, although it has been criticised for standardising repertoires around a handful of Minho tunes. Alongside the traditional chordophones and aerophones of older lineage, such as the Mirandese bagpipe, the concertina today occupies a central place on the popular sonic map of the North, keeping in its double reed the memory of the village festivals.