This article investigates the relationships between the politics of music, commerce and plurality with regard to Valtaro musette, a Northern Italian accordion repertoire and playing style that was popularized through the Italian cabaret culture of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in New York City. Focusing on the efforts of two musically influential piano accordionists and nightclub owners John Brugnoli (d. 2002) and Pete Spagnoli (b. 1921), this paper identifies the repertoire, musical style, and characteristics of these songs and decades of ongoing dance-hall events that accounted for this music commercial appeal and popularity with Northern Italian American immigrants. An overview of the differing symbolic possibilities of the accordion in urban Italian American culture at mid-century demonstrates that meaning assigned to musical instruments is often contradictory, always in flux, and subject to the positioning of interpreters. Contrary to some previous interpretations, this article suggests that the accordion provided an alternative to opera fan culture and a space for the articulation and affirmation of Italian ethnic experience through "continental" (European) music, as a response to the general sense of social and cultural isolation. I argue that the accordion and the Valtaro repertoire allowed change through a filtering process in which Northern Italian music and dance was legitimized by positioning itself as cosmopolitan, "continental", and European (in opposition to Southern Italian, rural, and poor). Through the creators of Valtaro musette and a second generation of players active today in New York, the accordion assumed implicit and explicit class and ethnic dimensions unique to the Northern Italian American context.

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{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Wicri/Musique
   |area=    OperaV1
   |flux=    Main
   |étape=   Exploration
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     Francis:10-0149175
   |texte=   Valtaro Musette: Italians, Accordions, and a Pluralistic Vision of Ethnicity in New York City
}}