“Ever since I was a kid, people felt they could tell me things,” Angelo Paul Ramunni confesses.
Growing up on Long Island in the 1950s and 60s, Ramunni was a quiet and shy kid from a Catholic, Italian-American family. It was almost inevitable then that he would take some accordion lessons. His mother considered the accordion “good, clean, and wholesome.”
He played in accordion orchestras at school, but that same wholesome image caused young Ramunni to be, at times, embarrassed by the accordion. Like so many high school musical instruments, Ramunni’s accordion was set in the back of a closet, untouched and unconsidered for decades.
Ramunni married, moved to Connecticut, and grew a successful CPA business, giving little further thought to accordions or his Catholic faith. He had long considered himself a cultural Catholic, going through the motions but without a true belief. Ramunni would write a book about this not-uncommon phenomenon called The Poor Catholic. “I purposely kept a distance between myself and God for 41 years of my life,” Ramunni notes, “I played religion but had no genuine faith in Christ.”
His journey back to God began in an unlikely place. Ramunni was growing disillusioned with his CPA practice. He began to notice that most of his client’s financial woes stemmed from moral choices. “It became like a confessional,” he says. This led to a kind of faith-based approach to his financial counsel. “It gave me a great deal of wisdom. What was the real cure to help people with their money problems?”
In 1998, Ramunni began giving away pocket-sized stone crosses in his unusually intimate encounters with people. The crosses come out when he senses someone needing help beyond what they can find from this world. He often gives them in pairs — one to keep and one to give to someone else.
Ramunni was 42 when his faith was reawakened. At 59 — 42 years after he last played his accordion — that too came back into his life.
One morning, while on vacation in Vermont with his wife, Ramunni awoke with a sudden and “inexplicable urge to play again.” He made some phone calls and soon had an appointment with a nearby accordion collector, from whom he purchased an Excelsior model 00 that day.
While there, Ramunni noticed several concertinas among the collection that the collector informed him had been in Nazi concentration camps. This conscious connection between instruments and their human stories sparked a quest that continues to this day.
Only later at home, when he was looking over his newly acquired Excelsior accordion, did he notice two small engraved crosses on its face. Neither he nor his wife had seen them when he made the purchase.
Ramunni was now on a mission, whether or not he could fully articulate it. He placed ads in local papers, logging many miles and visiting the homes of people with an old accordion to sell. Every accordion he bought came with a story. The best of these stories are presented in his 2018 book, Accordion Stories from the Heart. Many of these accordions belonged to departed loved ones, and sellers would sometimes become overwhelmed with emotion. At times, after money and accordion were exchanged, Ramunni would distribute a stone pocket cross and, with it, a slow peace.
In order to house this growing collection, Ramunni opened The New England Accordion Connection & Museum Company in Canaan, Connecticut, in 2011, with the stated goal to “promote the accordion and re-introduce it to the general public.”
As Ramunni continued to collect accordions and stories, and to distribute pocket crosses, he developed a philosophy. Harkening back to his mother’s sage words — that accordions are truly good — he began to see them as divinely inspired, even angelic.
For one thing, they are made in our image, and we are made in God’s. “Accordions are built to mimic how humans are built,” he observes, “First thing you do is embrace it; the straps hold it close to your chest. You actually hug it. We hug things we love. The keys are like our fingers. The bellows are like our lungs. It has a heartbeat, which we call tempo. The expression is something inside of you, the player.”
Like their human counterparts, no two accordions in his collection are alike. Multiple stories in Ramunni’s book confirm that the spirit of the accordion player can reside in its bellows, even after death. Ramunni calls this the player’s “second voice.”
Ramunni is witness every day in his museum to this power. His location in the Tri-state area allows for a steady stream of visitors from all over the world. Every person who walks through his door leaves somehow changed for the better. “When they enter the room, they’re just stunned,” Ramunni notes, “They are no longer Republican or Democrat; they just melt, and all of a sudden, we’re friends, a warm connection we didn’t even know — and it’s because of the accordion.”
He has learned to keep boxes of tissue on hand around the museum. “I play a little bit, and they start crying.”
Ramunni is encouraged by research suggesting the benefit of music, and especially the accordion, on patients suffering with autism and dementia. Accordion music releases endorphins within us, and perhaps these endorphins reside in the accordions themselves, somewhere in the bellows, among the departed souls and second voices.
Ramunni hopes this goodness can be carried on through younger generations. Children, he notes, are fascinated by the elaborate design and mechanical levers, unlike the smooth glass of their familiar phones and tablets. “Kids go nuts,” Ramunni notes, “they ask, ‘what is this?’ When I explain that they can manipulate the instrument to make their own music, they say, ‘I can make music?’”
In an ever-troubled world, Ramunni’s museum serves as a kind of sacred site, a collective energy radiating from his vast assemblage of accordions, each containing in some way some part of a human spirit. Ramunni is hopeful that someone will emerge to eventually take custody not only of the museum and its significant collection but of its mission of goodwill and mercy.
“We used to be kinder, more compassionate,” Ramunni notes, “We weren’t so distracted. We don’t pay attention to each other like we used to.”
Ramunni’s compassion may come in the form of a stone cross or a song. Visitors to his museum especially love to hear the emotive, sentimental music — songs like “Arrivederci Roma” — but Ramunni notes the power of accordion music transcends sentiment alone.
“You can play polka, jazz, whatever — all of it is designed to be happy. The sound is the language of heaven.”
Matt Powell is a writer and musician. His work explores the interconnectivity of all music and the people who create or listen. His writing has been featured in several publications, including Variety, No Depression, Emmys.com, and Angels Flight—Literary West. Learn more at www.theemattpowell.com
For More info go here:
Angelo Paul Ramunni, Director
The New England Accordion Connection & Museum Co.
P O Box 943….75 Main St, North Canaan, CT 06018
www.neacmc.com / 1-860-833-1374(cell) / For Stone Crosses:www.stonepocketcross.com