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Accordion Controversies – Panel Discussion
Event date: 09/04/2026
Location: Curt-Sachs-Saal, 6 p.m.
with Prof. Dr Conny Restle (UdK), Dr Yongfei Du (Ethnological Museum), Dr Sydney Hutchinson (SIM). Moderator: Dr Maurice Mengel (Ethnological Museum)
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 for 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 ethnomusicological, musicological, organological and musical perspectives. We will also have the opportunity to enjoy the sound.
Friday, 4 September 2026, 6.00–7.30 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 Maurice Mengel is Head of the Media Department at the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, part of the Berlin State Museums. He studied ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne and wrote his doctoral thesis 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 archiving 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.
Dr Yongfei Du is a lecturer in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of Music, Drama and Media, Hanover (HMTMH), and a research associate 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 Sydney Hutchinson is a music ethnologist and research fellow in music theory and music history at the State Institute for Music Research in Berlin, as well as a lecturer in pop music at Humboldt University in Berlin. She has published five books and numerous articles on Latin American music and dance, including the award-winning ethnography *Tigers of a Different Stripe: Performing Gender in Dominican Music*, which is based on ten years of fieldwork, and the textbook *Focus: Music of the Caribbean, which focuses on the accordion and the organology of the Caribbean. She is currently leading the DFG project ‘Zweite-Welt-Musik’, which examines the musical, choreographic and musicological exchange between Latin America and the GDR.
In collaboration with the Berlin State Music Council
