Bellows of love's lament: long synonymous with the tango and Buenos Aires, the bandoneon is at the heart of new efforts to preserve and expand Argentina's signature music.

• Author: Footer, Kevin Carrel

THE SULTRY ROMANCE BETWEEN Buenos Aires and the bandoneon is right out of a tango: a down-and-out immigrant from Saxony, a failure in his native land, washes up in a new town, wins the attentions of the coveted local belle, only to find her faithless. This being tango, he never ever gets over her. Thus was born the bandoneon's lament.

To be fair in this love story, she never forgets him either. Indeed, if it weren't for Buenos Aires, the bandoneon would have long ago been relegated to the pile of obscure musical inventions that failed: a complicated instrument to play with a strange sound, it likely would not have survived much beyond its birth in the 1840s if Buenos Aires and the new music being created there, tango, hadn't taken the instrument to their hearts. Like many immigrants who left old lives behind and started new ones in this faraway land, the bandoneon has fused so indelibly with the city that it is now impossible to conceive of the bandoneon without Buenos Aires--or Buenos Aires without her bandoneon.

The great caricaturist Hermenegildo Sabat writes, "The bandoneon continues to be the central element of tango, and the mystery of its sound has left behind its far Germanic origins to mimic the streets, the walls, and the hearts of Buenos Aires."

The bandoneon is so much at home in Buenos Aires that it doesn't even sound the same elsewhere. Walther Castro, one of the new generation of bandoneonists, swears that nowhere does his instrument play as well as it does in Buenos Aires. Perhaps it's the climate, Castro muses.

How is it that the bandoneon found refuge here, becoming eventually the preeminent symbol of the city and its music? Perhaps the immigrants who outnumbered the locals identified with the instrument's own wanderings; perhaps it was the bandoneon's ability to express their intense longings, hopes, fears, desperate loves, and loneliness; certainly, it had something to do with the bandoneon's mournful sound, which could give voile to the melancholy and nostalgia of a people who had left everything behind.

Lastima, bandoneon, mi corazon, runs the famous first lines of Catulo Castillo's "La ultima curda" [The Last Binge]: bandoneon, you wound my heart.

But, of course, this being a tango love story, it couldn't be ally other way.

The mystery of the bandoneon's lament begins, oddly enough, in China around 3,000 B.C., where the sheng, an instrument made with a gourd and bamboo pipes, was the first to employ the principle of the free reed. The idea is quite simple: Imagine a thin strip of metal placed over a slot of exactly the same dimensions (except that it is a tad shorter) cut into a thicker metal plate. At one end, the strip is riveted to the metal plate; at the other, it is left to move freely in and out of the slot below it. Blow air over the thin strip, or reed, and you get a note. Change the size of the reed (and the corresponding hole below it) and you get a different note.

When the free reed concept finally reached Germany in the late 1700s, it inspired inventors to look for ways to exploit its musical possibilities. The result was a time of wild experimentation that gave birth to many instruments, most of them absurd and three that have stood the test of time: the accordion, the harmonica and, of course, the bandoneon.

It was around 1840, in the town of Carlsfeld in Saxony that Carl Friedrich Zimmermann or Heinrich Band (historians disagree) invented the bandoneon. Band, a merchant, will go down in history for having fused his name with that of the accordion in order to differentiate his product's sound from that of his competitors. Zimmermann manufactured the instruments In his factory.

The bandoneon was not an instant success. All Band's considerable talents as a promoter were required to create a market for an instrument that was, to say the least, tricky to play. The complexity of the bandoneon derives directly from the ambitiousness of its inventors. Improbably, they wanted an instrument that could replace an organ in small, outlying churches. And they wanted it to be portable so that it could accompany processions through the streets of German villages.

Like the organ, the bandoneon was intended for polyphonic music rather than melodies. This meant that instead of arranging the notes on the keyboards in a linear fashion as on a piano, starting at A and climbing step by step through the twelve-tone scale, they were placed in a way to facilitate thee making of chords. Look at a diagram of the bandoneon keyboard and you will see a senseless jumble of notes.

"You have to learn to play as a child when you have nothing to worry about," says Pascual "Cholo" Mamone, eighty-two, a veteran bandoneonist. "If you are worried about how you'll manage to pay the electric bill, you'll never learn."

Not only that, but the two keyboards, one for the right hand and one for the left, are actually four different keyboards since any single button makes one note on...