Event details - Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung - Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The accordion originated in German-speaking Europe, but was soon adopted into traditional musical cultures around the world. Nevertheless, its role in these cultures remains a subject of heated debate amongst some. Do accordions destroy traditional cultures, or do they help to preserve them? Is the accordion inextricably linked to its Western origins, or should it rather be understood as a local or international instrument? On this evening, we will explore accordion cultures in Europe, Latin America and China from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, musicology, organology and music. We will also have the opportunity to enjoy the sound of the instrument.

Friday, 4 September 2026, 6.00 pm to 7.30 pm
Curt-Sachs Hall, Museum of Musical Instruments, State Institute for Music Research
Museum admission

Prof. Dr Conny Restle has been an honorary professor of musicology (instrumentology) at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2012. From 1994, she was Director of the SIMPK Musical Instrument Museum, and from 2002 to 2023 she served as Professor and Museum Director of the Musical Instrument Museum. Restle’s main areas of research include the organology of keyboard instruments, instruments of antiquity and the Middle Ages, acoustics and historical performance practice. 

Dr Yongfei Du is a lecturer in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of Music, Drama and Media, Hanover (HMTMH), and a research fellow at the Centre for World Music (CWM) at the University of Hildesheim. She studied musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin and obtained her PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Hildesheim. As part of her teaching and research activities at various German universities – including Halle-Wittenberg and Lübeck – she has carried out extensive fieldwork and archival research in China, Germany, Brazil and Ghana. Her main areas of research include musical instruments, migration and dance studies, East Asian popular music and choral music. Her most recent publications include studies on the processes of transformation of the Chinese guqin (2021) and on discourses of identity within the Chinese diaspora (2025).

Dr Maurice Mengel is Head of the Media Department at the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, part of the State Museums of Berlin. He studied ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne and completed his PhD on a Romanian music archive in Bucharest and its role in socialist cultural policy. In 2004, he began working at the Ethnological Museum for the first time, focusing in particular on digital initiatives, metadata and archival projects; since 2019, he has been curator of the museum’s musical instrument collection and is responsible for the Media Department, which holds collections of film, photographs and sound recordings, including the Berlin Phonogram Archive.

In collaboration with the Berlin State Music Council

Further links

• Cabinet exhibition at the MIM