Poor accordion! Despite its ubiquity in musical traditions around the globe, it clearly suffers from an image problem here in the United States, where too often it is subject to derision and ridicule. Fortunately, the bellowed beauty has a youthful champion—Cory Pesaturo—a musician on a mission to make the accordion “cool” again. And based on the reception he had at a recent series of concerts and university classroom visits in Chicago, his objective just might be within reach. In a conversation that stretched over an hour, Pesaturo shared stories about his years of accordion studies and performances, as well as the history of this fascinating instrument. Both Pesaturo and the instrument he plays share significant connections to Italian and Italian American history, and our talk touched on the central role that music plays in preserving cultural memory.Pesaturo was introduced to the accordion at a young age by his father, the son of a Neapolitan immigrant with an appreciation of the musical traditions of his family's region of origin. Indeed, few instruments are more closely associated with traditional Italian and Italian American music than the accordion. But while today we might think of accordion music in nostalgic terms, Pesaturo is quick to point out that the instrument remains tremendously popular all over Europe, throughout South America, and in Mexico, and there was a time when here in the United States its popularity exceeded that of the guitar. (Yes, really. So there, Jimmy Fallon!) He wants his audiences to know this, and through his performances featuring a wide variety of musical genres and styles—from classical, jazz, techno pop, and rock to more traditional klezmer, polkas, mazurkas, and tarantellas—he aims for a new generation of Americans to fall in love with the accordion all over again.A native of Rhode Island, Pesaturo says he began taking accordion lessons because he was “a good son”: When I was nine years old, my dad asked me—you know, growing up in an Italian household—”Would you like to play the accordion?” . . . I was too young and stupid to think “Why would I want to play the accordion in the twentieth century?” So I went, “Okay, sure.” I should have thought, you know, am I going to get made fun of in school? Am I ever going to get a prom date? You know, things like this.”In Pesaturo's words, his father “pulled some Italian stuff” to coax nationally recognized accordionist and composer and fellow Italian American Tullio Gasperini out of retirement to take Pesaturo on as a student. He relates that he did not really “love” the accordion until he began to enjoy the success he experienced in musical competitions. “I'm a very competitive person, but I wasn't any good at sports, so the accordion sort of became my sport.”And competitive he was. In 2002, at the age of 15, he became the youngest winner of the National Accordion Championship, and after winning a national concerto competition the following year, he was invited to be a featured soloist with the Brockton Symphony Orchestra, the youngest person ever to do so. When he was even younger, at age 11, his father, a fervid believer in his son's special talent, submitted a video tape to the White House to apply to perform there at Christmas. Not only was young Cory selected, but while there he was “nudged” by his father in the direction of the president, Bill Clinton, and other dignitaries. Pesaturo states, “He (my father) pushed me in the room where people like Wolf Blitzer were gathered. They were surrounded by the Secret Service.” When the president took a break, Pesaturo's father prompted him to start playing. “I played ‘El Relacario,’ a Spanish tune, because it was the hardest piece I knew.” The ploy worked. Cory got the president's attention. “He came up to me while drinking his diet Coke and gave me advice. He said I needed to be like Michael Jordan and always work hard.”President Clinton was impressed enough to invite the young musician back to the White House on multiple occasions, the most auspicious being when he played at a State dinner for the president of Hungary, accompanied by the Marine Corps Strolling Strings. The president himself introduced Cory to the audience, and, after playing, Cory and his parents stayed and danced. It was an evening to remember, but, as Pesaturo tells it, even more so because of his father's interaction with the president.“This was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment trial,” Pesaturo states: Now you have to understand my Italian American grandmother had taught my father “You're better than no one, but no one's better than you.” And my father lived by that. So when he was face to face with President Clinton, he gave him a slap on the cheek, you know, Italian-style, and says, “You're a hard shit.” And the President responded, “I know what you mean.”He laughed as he spoke and recalled with fondness that President Clinton was not only a music lover but very “down to earth.”Despite such success, Pesaturo still did not feel any great love for the accordion until he discovered jazz. “I found jazz through the clarinet, in middle school. I chose it because it was . . . small and I could manage it while I was carrying a heavy accordion around.” He became a member of his school's jazz ensemble, and his demonstrated musical talent led him to be accepted by one of the main jazz clarinet teachers of the region. Pesaturo reports, “After a good lesson, he would take out a jazz book, and we'd start playing tunes like ‘Misty’ and ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams.’ I loved it. I wanted to learn everything about jazz as fast as possible.”After graduating from high school, Pesaturo went on to study at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) in Boston. He had also been accepted at Berklee College of Music. “But when I applied with my accordion, they laughed. They didn't have an accordion program, so they accepted me for the clarinet.” By this time, though, he had fallen in love with the accordion and wasn't about to give it up. He went on to become the first graduate from NEC in accordion and has been performing nonstop ever since. He has won numerous competitions and awards, including the Coupe Mondiale World Digital Accordion Championship in Auckland, New Zealand, where he became the first American to win a World Accordion Championship in more than 25 years. In June 2009, Pesaturo won the Leavenworth International Championship and the International Jazz Championship, and more recently, he won the 2011 Primus Ikaalinen World Championship in Finland as the first-ever American contestant. Other notable accomplishments include his induction into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2017 for the longest continuous playing of the accordion (32 hours and 14 minutes). Pesaturo is one of only four accordionists in history to win a world championship on both acoustic and electronic accordion and the only person to also win a world championship in jazz. In total, he has performed on five continents and in ten different countries, including Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Tunisia, and Japan. But despite the enthusiasm that Pesaturo's playing has incited abroad, his musicianship remains undervalued in his native country, where the accordion continues to be associated with grandparents and yesteryear, if given any consideration at all.Pesaturo wants his audiences to know that “Up until the 1960s, and the advent of rock-n-roll, the accordion was the most popular instrument in the States. And it held its own for a while, until guitar took over.” He notes, “Most people know about the Beatles performing on the Ed Sullivan Show, but not many people today know that the person who had the record number of performances on the show was Dick Contino, an accordionist.” Pesaturo describes Contino as being so big during his heyday, in the 1950s, that he was known simply as “The Dude.” “It is hard to imagine today,” he muses, “[that] a solo accordionist would be able to play on . . . SNL more times than U2 or Metallica or something. That's how big he was.” Going back even further, from 1900 through 1910, Pesaturo says that the first famous accordion player in the States was Guido Deiro. “He was so famous and such a big deal that he actually married Mae West in 1914. [She] was the sex symbol of the day; she was a huge actress, she was it. So that's hard to imagine. I don't see myself, you know . . . [ending up with] Lady Gaga, Megan Fox, or Miley Cyrus.” Pesaturo chuckled at what he seemed to imagine to be highly improbable romantic matches, but, after watching him perform, I couldn't help thinking, well, why not?Notably, both Cotnino and Deiro were Italian Americans, and it was the combined exportation of both musicians and innovative instrumental design from Italy that allowed the accordion to take off in the United States. According to Pesaturo, the piano accordion, the model we are most familiar with in this country featuring a right-hand keyboard similar to a piano on one side and chord buttons on the other, was developed specifically for the American market. “Lots of people had pianos in their houses at the time, so the look of the keyboard was familiar. It was a marketing tool. The accordion was like a piano, but, unlike a piano, it was portable. You could take it places with you to play.” Guido Deiro played the keyboard accordion made by the Ronco-Vercelli accordion company in Italy, and it soon became the predominant style on the market.Today, almost all accordions are made in the town of Castelfidardo, in the Marche region of central-eastern Italy, where a number of small- and medium-sized manufacturers are still in business. Because there are so many small parts in an accordion, a good percentage of its production continues to be done by hand, following in the Italian artisanal tradition. The instrument's final decorating can be especially creative and unique, according to the purchaser's preferences. Pesaturo likes to tell his audiences about Castelfidardo and how, when employees at one accordion factory get upset and quit, they just run down the road and begin working for another. Their skills are specialized and necessary, and there is a limited supply of qualified people.Pesaturo also has many fond memories of his performances in Italy, especially in Lazio where part of his family descends from the small town of Arce. On a vacation/tour with a group of fellow musicians from Detroit, he recalls having had a “magical” experience performing in the town of Alvito. “It was one of those outdoor auditoriums where it feels like you're going to fall off the side of the mountain. The whole town came out to see us, led by the mayor, and everyone knew the songs. It was incredible.” Even more incredible was the group's departure for the airport the next day.I concurred with Pesaturo that I couldn't imagine anything similar happening in the States.Throughout his time with me, Pesaturo periodically spoke in Italian and had no problem understanding the questions one of my Italian colleagues posed to him as he demonstrated his accordion to her students. I asked him if he had learned Italian growing up at home or if he had studied it at school. His answer—a “No” to both—surprised me. “I actually learned Italian from being immersed in the accordion community,” he told me. “There are so many Italians and Italian Americans that it has brought me into contact with, starting with my first teacher, Tullio Gasperini.” He reflected that his Italian ethnic identity was connected to his vision of himself as a musician, more specifically as an accordionist. When he heard Dick Contino play, he said, “It seemed natural that it was what Italians are supposed to do. I saw him perform and wanted to be like him.” And in time, being like Dick Contino came to include speaking the Italian language.The linguistic void in Pesaturo's family dates back to the era of World War II, when Pesaturo's father was born (“My Dad's a little older,” he joked.) After Italy allied itself with Germany, many Italian immigrants who had not become US citizens were declared enemy aliens, with some being interred in detention camps. Even those who had become citizens or were born in the United States had their patriotism called into question. Posters were plastered in Italian-ethnic neighborhoods admonishing residents, “Don't speak the enemy's language!” It followed that Italian Americans assiduously avoided speaking Italian in public and insisted that their children only speak English.1 According to Pesaturo, his father's mother was the “most authentically Italian.” Her parents were from Sulmona and L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, and, though she spoke “beautiful Italian,” she refused to teach it to her son. She wanted him, and her other children, to “be American.” Pesaturo's father, however, was not to be deterred, and, on his own, he sought out the company of his paternal grandmother, who spoke Neapolitan. That is the language Pesaturo's father learned, and still enjoys conversing in today, even though he never used it at home when his son was growing up. Pesaturo relates this story with some regret that his father was denied the opportunity to learn the “good” Italian his mother spoke.I pointed out that the Neapolitan dialect need not be held up in comparison to “good” Italian. Many of the traditional Italian songs that are part of Pesaturo's repertoire are Neapolitan and feature beautiful lyrics. I recalled an article that referred to Neapolitan as “a joyously piquant language full of irony and comedy” (Melia 2017). Pesaturo, while conceding that this may be true, reminded me that he usually does not sing. He had, in fact, traveled to Chicago with his accompanist and NEC classmate Rachel Eve Holmes, an operatic soprano whose studies included formal training in Italian. Proving that it really is a “piccolo mondo,” Holmes had studied Italian with one of the Italian instructors for whose classes Pesaturo and she performed. My colleague Anna Clara Ionta was Holmes's professor in the immersive Italian summer program at Middlebury College, Vermont. Holmes, who has no Italian heritage herself, was happy to share with the students how important her Italian language studies were to her professional formation as a singer. Beyond her use of Italian in the many arias that are part of her repertoire, she pointed out the numerous Italian musical terms that are used in English, evidence of one of Italy's many contributions to the cultural and historical heritage of Europe and the world.Pesaturo told me that he would have studied Italian at school, had it been offered. The high school in the town where he was born, one in which many Italian immigrants had settled, had an Italian program, but when his family moved to a more suburban part of the state, Italian was not among the foreign languages taught. After interviewing Pesaturo, I checked to see if the high school in his birth town was still offering Italian and was relieved to see that it was. Rhode Island, with its high per capita representation of Italian Americans, once had a large number of school Italian programs, so many that the state, despite its diminutive geographic size, had its own chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. It still does, but across the country, the number of Italian programs in recent years has declined.As Pesaturo and I concluded our chat, I reflected on his quest to promote the accordion by raising awareness of the instrument's venerable history and demonstrating its versatility in the contemporary musical scene. I doubt that Pesaturo's great-grandparents, who settled in Federal Hill, Providence's “Little Italy,” in 1917 would have ever imagined that, more than one hundred years later, one of their progeny would be entertaining the mayor of an Italian town. Through the accordion, Pesaturo is keeping an Italian cultural tradition alive and meaningful in the present and sharing it with the world. His story can serve as inspiration to look for other ways by which we can connect to our Italian heritage and find meaningful ways for it to enrich the present, perhaps at home by passing down customs and practices and in the community by supporting Italian-language programs in our schools. Whatever the case may be, we should follow in Pesaturo's example and move beyond nostalgia to examine the history that informs and sustains us in the present, often in surprising and provocative ways.For more information on Cory Pesaturo and his upcoming performances, visit his website: https://www.cpezmusic.com/