Forget LinkedIn, Accordions are the Way to Network

At the end of my freshman year of college, my mother came to pick me up and take me home. After we finished packing up the car, we started to drive away, at which point she told me, “there’s a surprise for you when you get home.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Do you really want me to tell you?”

“No,” I replied.

This of course didn’t stop me from guessing throughout the two-hour ride home, and the only hint she gave me was that “no money changed hands.” OK. Interesting. And even more confusing. My best and only guess was a record player, since that was something I had talked to her and my father about getting previously, though they were not into the idea since that would mean I would then acquire an obscene amount of records.

We got home and I went upstairs to my room, where I was confronted with an old brown box — a case really — which I promptly opened. It was not a record player.

It was an accordion.

For a little context, I come from a musical family and consider myself fairly musical. I have been playing piano since I was a kid and picked up several other instruments along the way. Sometimes, I thought I might want to learn accordion someday, but I was also aware that the cost of a new instrument could be rather expensive compared to an electric guitar or a ukulele.

So imagine my surprise to find what appeared to be a free vintage accordion in my room. It’s a Silvestri (or technically a “Silvestr,” since the letter “I” at the end seemed to have disappeared by the time it had made its way to me), and I would later learn that it was probably from 1948, give or take a few years, judging from the shape of the ends of the keys.

My mother explained that our neighbors had reached out to my father, asking if he knew anyone who would be interested in taking an old accordion since they were unable to play it and it felt like having a full suitcase strapped to your chest. He told them he did, thinking of me. So he went next door, picked up the instrument, and walked back to our house, at which point my mother woke up from her nap and said “you got a what?!” To which my father replied “Max will play it! And no money changed hands.” So my mother accepted that now there would be an accordion in our house too.

It needed to be fixed up when I got it. Some keys were sticky, others didn’t make sounds at all, but that summer I had a lot of fun learning how to play it anyway. Eventually, through a high school friend, who played accordion, I found a repairman, who opened it up and got everything working properly again.

That was three, nearly four years ago. Since then, my biggest discovery about the accordion is that everyone seems to be looking for one, and more often than not the person playing it too. My second year at school (the first with the accordion), I found my way into two different bands, Billy Liar and the Crane Wives, and the Post-Soviet Volunteers. The former was a Decemberists cover band I formed with a couple of friends for a Halloween concert. The latter was a group of students from the Russian department, led by a professor. Though I did not speak an ounce of Russian, nor was I even a student of the department (I was in fact a history student taking German), a couple of friends in the department introduced me to the professor in charge, who brought me onboard.

I also found a surprising amount of work in student theatre playing my accordion, often by accident, including an early modern revenge tragedy, probably written by Thomas Middleton, appropriately titled The Revenger’s Tragedy, to a student-written musical about the Donner Party framed as a parody of an educational children’s television show, The Donner Party Kidz! Some of it was composing, some of it was arranging, but all of it was a fun release from the ordinary stresses of schoolwork and college life.

Fast forward to November of this year; I was five months out of college, looking for full time work and working at two part-time internships while living at home. It had been months since I last performed with my accordion at a Russian Department event, and had not played in a little while, when all of a sudden I received a Facebook message from a professor at my alma mater. Turns out, the Drama Department was putting on a musical in two weeks, The Spitfire Grill, and they needed an accordion player.

After talking about it with my parents over dinner, I said yes, and a week later I showed up to my first full run-through of the show, though not before almost being recruited to perform for a French cabaret while learning my music. Any free time I had until then I had basically spent learning music and would continue practicing obsessively throughout the week. It was fun, and when the show ended, I missed it.

So I guess the lesson learned is: if you want to get ahead in life, play the accordion.