Meet your friendly neighborhood accordionist, Dan Turpening
The artist, musician and entrepreneur has owned Dan Turpening’s Accordion Shoppe in northeast Minneapolis’ Thorp Building since 1999.
From polka to punk and ages nine to 99, the accordion has a little something for everyone.
"To find the notes, there's different ways to do it — it's kind of like a puzzle," said Dan Turpening.
Turpening, an artist, musician and entrepreneur, owns Dan Turpening’s Accordion Shoppe in northeast Minneapolis’ Thorp Building. That’s where he’s stationed himself in the community for repairs, lessons and all other things accordion since 1999.
In those nearly 25 years of tinkering, tuning and troubleshooting, the majority of Turpening’s time is spent answering the calls of his customers’ concertinas.
But that wasn’t always the plan.
“It wasn’t like I was dreaming of repairing accordions,” Turpening said. “I grew up repairing cars, so I'm really mechanical by nature. It’s just how my brain works.”
a world of accordions
Coming to Minnesota by way of Pennsylvania as a kid, it was Turpening’s mother, a classically trained pianist and teacher, who first exposed him to playing music.
“We ironically never learned to play piano because she would always have 35 or 40 students a week,” he said. “They came home with us on the school bus and wouldn’t leave until it was time to go to bed… we didn’t like the piano.”
Regardless of his aversion to the piano and the collection of kids who came with it, Turpening joined the high school band on brass and never really looked back. Baritone horn was first, followed by the trombone, which preceded his college years on tuba, which is admittedly still Dan’s favorite.
"I love the tuba."
While Turpening got in his own groove on the horn, he later realized a matinee at the Minneapolis Institute of Art would serve as the impetus into his future entwinement with the familiar, yet arguably misunderstood, mechanical wind instrument.
“I actually fell in love with the accordion from an old Italian film — Fellini's ‘Amarcord,’ was the movie,” he said. “I was really a shy kid actually, so it took me a while to kind of say, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and learn how to play.”
When Turpening made the transformation from little boy to young man, he mustered up the confidence to pursue his love, learning to play and restore the intricate instruments at Dr. Helmi Strahl Harrington’s Accordion-concertina Repair and Technicians’ School (ARTS) in Duluth.
Dr. Harrington opened her first school at Red Wing Technical College in the early 90s, later landing herself, with a plethora of accordions in tow, on the opposite side of the state in Duluth. It was there that Turpening honed his craft.
"I had a really good teacher, so I mean, I think to think about it logically and mechanically," Turpening said. "My mechanical background helps me to think about how it makes sound. It just seemed to make sense."
Under the direction of the award-winning doctor of musicology and founder of both Harrington ARTS School and Superior, Wisconsin’s A World of Accordions Museum, Turpening completed the accordion aficionado’s year-long program, and shortly thereafter, jumped into a world of accordions all his own — hands, head and heart first.
'Do the best you can'
Now, he not only plays and repairs the instruments, but also helps mold the minds of a vast spectrum of new music makers.
"It's a huge range of ages — a lot of retired people," he said. "Right now, I've got a couple students who are so much fun and one's retired, one's almost retired — a couple of gals and they're really good friends. They come and get lessons together and then they practice together and they just think it's more fun."
Turpening said he's also had students on the other end of the age spectrum, working with some as young as four — which shockingly "didn't work."
While Turpening wouldn't want to steer any of his pupils away, he thinks the complexity of the machine is better left to be studied by slightly more mature scholars.
"I have a 9-year-old right now and that's awfully fun," he said. "You just work around things and do the best you can."
Working around the construction and design of any given accordion or concertina is somewhat standardized, but at the same time, the instruments each contain their own nuances. Whether it's the differences of push and pull of diatonic or chromatic accordions or the size and shape between an Irish-made Anglo hex concertina or an Italian-made Gola piano accordion, Turpening said each instrument that comes through his shop ends up as an embodiment of the people who play them.
“I love the way you get to know an instrument well enough that it just becomes an extension of yourself,” he said. "They'll basically work in the same way, but there's different ways of solving the problems that happen with it. You're actively trying to make things quiet, efficient, fast — and there's different ways to do that."
Turpening's accordion school curriculum comes full circle for the former brass musician, who said first-time players should think of the squeezebox (Turpening hates that nickname, by the way) the same.
"I end up spending the most time trying to get people to approach it as a wind instrument," he said of his teaching technique. "When you play brass instruments, you're making a combination and then you're making the air go through it. You're trying to make it breathe with the phrases and with the bellows when you can, too."
But perhaps somewhat reliably — at least with a tuned instrument in working condition — one thing usually does universally remain.
"The thing that it has going for it is that you don't have to develop a tone, it's already there," Turpening said.
perfect pitch
Although his love for the accordion runs deep through his veins, Turpening makes sure not to take himself or his craft too seriously.
"What's the definition of perfect pitch?" he asked.
"When you throw a banjo in the dumpster and it lands on an accordion."
In addition to offering repairs and lessons, Turpening also plays various gigs in the community. His latest? One of two accordion accompaniments for Minneapolis' Open Eye Theatre's Driveway Tour backyard puppet shows ("A great treat!")
For more information on the Driveway Tour, click here.
For more information on Dan Turpening's Accordion Shoppe, click here.
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