Each accordion is worth a thousand words

NORTH CANAAN — New England Accordion Connection and Museum is expanding to an upstairs room in the Canaan Union Station.

The “Community Music Room,” as named by Paul Ramunni, director of the museum, is intended to bring people together around joyful music.

In the spirit of preservation and the creation of new memories and stories, Ramunni’s vision for the new expansion of the museum is a place for people with any instrument to get together and jam. The inspiration for this was about a year ago when two students from the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk came to the museum wanting to see an accordion.

Ramunni asked where they were from; one was from Iran and the other from Israel. He recalled, “At that moment, what was going on is what’s always going on over there: their families were in the middle of battles. He said ‘Paul, when we met here for the first time, there was something that connected. It was music. We both agreed that we would never let anything come between us that would ruin that bond.’”

After they left, Ramunni said the idea for a community room struck him. Regardless of background or beliefs, he said, music can bring people together.

Ramunni has more than 650 accordions in his collection, each with its own story to tell.

“When we started collecting,” said Ramunni, “I didn’t think much of the backstory. I was thinking, ‘Hey, that’s a cool little one.’” He soon found out that “there’s a lot of memories packed into each one of these things, because you only played them when you wanted to make other people happy.”

The new “Community Music Room” at Canaan Union Station.David Carley

42 years had gone by since Ramunni first picked up the instrument, and he found himself in the garage of a collector with more than a dozen accordions. He was sending them to a Holocaust Museum in Glen Cove, Long Island. “Those came out of the camps at Dachau during World War II,” Ramunni explained.

“That’s what got me going when I went around looking at accordions, I’d look for the stories. This is history here. It’s not just bottle caps that we’re collecting here. This is what people did with these things, and sacrifices they made. It’s important to preserve,” he stated.

Even the origins of the accordion, according to Ramunni, came from a desire for community. “Since the birth of the country, these things were being made in people’s shops because they wanted music… So, they came up with the first accordions,” which were smaller, wooden contraptions called flutinas, originally patented in 1829 in Vienna, Austria.

The beginning of the 20th century is when the instrument took its modern form with a larger body and piano keys. From 1900 to 1960, millions were made in the United States, and competing companies would distinguish their product with intricate case designs and impressive craftsmanship.

Perhaps more important are the stories imbued within, and as Ramunni shared, “They each have their own personality.”