Matty Metcalfe began playing the piano when he was four, and a decade later he was winning prizes including the prestigious Washington D.C. Classical Guild award. When high school friends formed a band, he took up another keyboard instrument – the accordion.
“My friends started going to the street corners of Alexandria to play Grateful Dead covers, and it didn’t seem practical to bring a keyboard with me," he recalls. "The accordion my mother found it at a yard sale – that became the choice.”
He would go on to study music at William and Mary and to serve as Musical Ambassador at Harvard, arranging concerts for musicians from around the world. The accordion, he discovered, was played almost everywhere.
“There was accordion music from Africa, from Japan, from Mongolia, and it really opened my eyes and ears to what a cultural chameleon the accordion was — how it could fit in," he sats. "It could be a horn section in Tejano music and it could be a gypsy violin sound in Romania.”
He had studied with Dale Wise, a master of the accordion and winner of a grant from Virginia Humanities to share that instrument with a new generation of musicians. When Wise died, his kids inherited a large collection of squeeze boxes, and Metcalfe was tasked with repairing them.
“You wouldn’t know, to look at an accordion, what is wrong with it. 99.9% of the problems are on the inside," he explains. "If you store it in a certain direction, leather components tend to bend with gravity away from where they should be, and so that is a problem. Humidity, salty air, heat – all these things melt the bees wax-held reeds and rust the metal reeds themselves, so you don’t know until you look inside why someone’s accordion sounds like a dying duck.”
He says accordions have a lifespan of about 50 years, and repairing the older instruments is a big job because the metal reeds that vibrate are held in place with wax.
“The wax tends to crack and to reset the reeds around them, because you melt the wax around them – it’s a very exhaustive process, and it’s just not worth it to most people.”
Especially since a high-quality new instrument can be had for less than $10,000. Most are made in Italy and Germany, and orders come in from around the world.
The instrument is central to popular music in Brazil, Mexico and certain parts of the U.S. Metcalfe discovered a pocket of players in Nashville during the pandemic when they met online.
“Eight of us nerding-out over our accordions one at a time with the Zoom picture flashing before us from one to the other, and within that five or six year time frame they’re up to about 200 members. They can barely squeeze into this Bavarian beer hall in Nashville.”
And he hopes the instrument will experience an even greater resurgence in the years to come – but he’s not holding his breath.
“We had Weird Al Yankovich growing up, but there’s really not that figurehead who is galvanizing the accordion community anymore.”
For now, he makes a living performing, giving lessons and making repairs. Because the instruments can weigh as much as 28 pounds, he says, it does help him stay fit.
“When I was playing 6,7 hours a day, I was like Popeye.”
And this year he got a grant from Virginia Humanities to mentor an apprentice and pass on repair skills for the accordion.
