The 2024 XinJiang Tacheng International Accordion Culture and Art Festival is a three day festival which attracts enormous audiences for its main outdoor public concerts.

The festival includes international cultural activities with the Accordion Museum in Tacheng. This is the largest accordion museum in China and has some 1,500 accordions from 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany and Italy. The oldest accordion were constructed some 180 years years ago.

We met Dawran·Dosanhan founder of the Tacheng Accordion Museum. Dawram has been collecting accordion for many years, and the newspaper reported one of his experiences that very much impressed him in Kazakhstan.

In 2014, when he was collecting accordions in Kazakhstan, he met a 92-year-old Russian who had 22 accordions made in Germany during the Second World War. He wanted to purchase these accordions but the old man refused. When Dosanhan explained to him that he wanted to open a museum in China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region to showcase accordions from each period in history, to help people learn more about the instruments, the man happily agreed.

As Dosanhan removed these accordions, the man couldn’t help shedding tears while touching the instruments affectionately, as if he was saying goodbye to his children.

This deeply touched Dosanhan, and every time he stands in the exhibition hall of the museum, he can’t help recalling these memories and feels a responsibility to share and spread accordion culture.

The third day of the festival started in the morning with a return to the Tacheng Accordion Museum to continue the Confédération Internationale des Accordéonistes (CIA) World Accordion Museum Alliance (WAMA) Summit in Tacheng. Video below.

Presentation by World Accordion Museum Alliance (WAMA) Director Kevin Friedrich and Executive Officer Harley Jones at the 2024 4th XinJiang Tacheng International Accordion Culture and Art Festival, China. translation by Crystal Wang – Deputy Secretary-General of the Chinese Accordion Association.

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome and Introduction of Kevin Friedrich & Harley Jones
01:05 Introduction to World Accordion Museum Alliance and member Museums
06:10 Visit to the Museum for the First Tacheng Festival
08:00 List of International Museum members
10:23 Showcasing of accordion history
11:08 Sheng
12:53 Development from the 1800s
15:09 Handaeoline
15:50 Cyril Demian’s 1829 patent of the accordion
21:05 Flutinas
22:18 Accordion Production in Paris
24:23 Austrian development of individual reed chambers
26:10 Emergence of the accordion in Italy
28:30 Extract of the documentary ‘A World of Accordions, A Harrington Legacy’ from Helmi Harrington, Ph.D. Full video will be available at www.atgaccordions.com/
34:23 Thanking the Tacheng Accordion Museum Officials and presenting a gift from Dargaville Museum, New Zealand
39:33 Presentation on New Zealand born John H Reuther’s Uniform Keyboard
44:30 Gifting of Uniform Keyboard Accordion from Dargaville Museum to Tacheng Accordion Museum

Closing Ceremony involved another amazing concert so well organised, that had an audience of about 10,000 people. The support of such numbers of local people of Tacheng was simply amazing.