The Accordion Project was an ethnomusicological research project conducted by Maria Sonevytsky, a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at Columbia University.

The project was conceived after observing the multiple ways in which the accordion was and is being incorporated by diverse performers in diverse genre in the contemporary New York music world, thus presenting a unique lens from which to view the processes by which musicians engage with ideas of instrument, genre/style, creativity and talent, and subsequently, negotiate their distinctive identities in an urban musical landscape that is famously saturated with innovators, imposters, and imitators.

The project was a multi-sited ethnography that took different accordionists spanning a variety of traditional and non-traditional accordion genres as its collective “field.” Drawing on interviews with these musicians, recordings of their music, and live performances, the project sought to establish and interrogate the commonly held stereotypes about the accordion in the United States and in New York City, in particular. In the broadest view, this project explored processes of conscious, coded, and mediated identity and image formation along the intersections of instrument and musician, advocating, in this way, for a new brand of culturally situated organology. Copies of the thesis are available by contacting the author or through the Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology digital MA thesis archive.