Accordions are woven into New Mexico’s soundscape—at fiestas, on plazas, and in the musical storytelling traditions that travel across generations. In this episode of Encounter Culture, host Emily Withnall talks with Tony Tomei and Antonio Maestas, a master-and-apprentice duo who completed the New Mexico Arts Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program in 2024, focusing on accordion restoration and traditional New Mexico tunings.
Tony and Antonio fell in love with the accordion in different decades and play different styles. Tony first encountered the accordion as a child in the 1950s, growing up in an ethnically diverse community where the instrument was central to social life. ”And that was before the Beatles came in the sixties and basically wreaked havoc with the accordion and everybody switched over to the guitars,” Tony laughs.
As a kid, Antonio had heard stories about his grandfather entertaining the family and was drawn to the sound of the accordion, but felt it was intimidating and inaccessible. He later picked it up around the start of the COVID era after falling in love with Colombian cumbia.
And the popularity of the accordion endures! Tony and Antonio bring the conversation and their shared passion for the instrument down to the workbench: what breaks, how tuning works, why repair demand is high, and what it means to pass on a craft through mentorship.
They also reveal the deeper values behind the craft—patience, precision, and doing careful work even when the customer may never see the difference.
”A full size accordion has, like, 5,000 parts,” says Antonio. “The customer may not see a scratch on the inside of their accordion, but first do no harm. The very principle of integrity is to do the right thing when nobody’s looking, to do the right thing when nobody knows.”
Discover more:
New Mexico Arts Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program
New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs on YouTube
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