25 years in Northeast: Tweaking accordions is his gig

Musician and business owner Dan Turpening’s Accordion Shoppe has been operating for a quarter-century in Northeast Minneapolis, and, in a recent interview, he talked about how he got to this point.

Turpening’s family moved from Pennsylvania to Minnesota when he was five years old; he grew up in Lakeville. He was surrounded by music from an early age, with his mother, a pianist and teacher, instructing dozens of piano students in their home each week. 

While that may have moved him away from the piano, he embraced brass instruments in junior and senior high school, beginning with baritone horn, then trombone, settling on tuba, which he says is his favorite horn.

He noted it was the 1973 Fellini movie “Amarcord,” with Nino Rota’s accordion-heavy music score, that, as he grew older, moved him to study the instrument he described as familiar but misunderstood. 

At age 20, he was living in Duluth, taking care of his aunt while studying art in college. He described his decisions then as “One foot after the other, just following what was kind of laid out in front of me.” 

In 1994, he enrolled in a year-long program at the Accordion-concertina Repair and Technicians’ School (ARTS) in Superior, Wis., founded by German-born musicologist
Helmi Strahl Harrington. He said his mechanical background (he was repairing cars before he could drive himself) helped him learn the intricacies of accordion repair and restoration. 

At the same time, he learned to play the instrument, adding a skill that would later become another source of income, playing gigs around the Twin Cities.

Turpening said he originally moved to a studio with his sister, creating ceramics. “But then life happened — she joined the Peace Corps, met her future husband, and then the place became mine.” He said he let his training “sit for a while … because it honestly wasn’t what I wanted to do at that time.”

Turpening’s workspace for the last 25 years is in a narrow, high-ceilinged second-floor corner of the Thorp Building, 1620 Central Ave. NE, with two tall windows lighting the shelved walls, which are jammed with concertinas and piano accordions in various stages of completeness, along with record albums and stereo equipment. He said he found 130 accordions as one lot on eBay, bought them and drove with his father to New York to pick them up. He still has many of them on his shelves.

Asked about the difficulties of repairing the delicate parts of the accordion, he said, “I was working on a Hohner Gola, an accordion that costs upwards of $20,000. It has the normal six rows of 120 buttons, and then another 60 or so in front of that. And those are all single notes going all up and down the range … then you’ve got a ‘bass machine’ that makes all those notes happen with reusing all the reeds. 

“Hohner used a lot of metal in all their instruments, even the most expensive ones. It was some kind of aluminum alloy with a powdery rust that would clog up the action. So I had to take the bass machine apart and lay it out on several tables. The machine has these little hair-like springs that had to be installed with a tiny tweezers. So I put one in and heard it fly out somewhere in the shop. I almost died because, I mean, you can’t get these parts. Of course, I would have had to make something that wouldn’t have worked well. So, I called my mom, who came and spent the entire day looking — my elderly mother here, looking all over. And she found it. Mom saved the day!” 

Turpening also uses his space for accordion lessons for students who range in age from ten years old to retirees. He said he found out a few things about teaching, one of which is that the accordion’s complexity makes it hard to learn if the student is very young, and another is that teaching in person is superior to teaching on Zoom. He noted that one thing about the accordion that differs from most other instruments is “You don’t have to develop a tone because it’s already there.”

Turpening also directs some of his leftover energy to car repair and resale. He admits only to owning “several” vintage autos, calling his favorite a 1963 Mercedes-Benz sedan. Proof of his interest in old cars can be seen in his studio, with the bonnet of a 1953 Jaguar two-seater leaning against the wall, above a stack of the car’s engine parts.

Turpening is entering the holiday season by continuing his accordion restoration and giving performances at The Black Forest Inn on Dec. 20 and a New Year’s appearance at the downtown restaurant Chloe by Vincent.