I have entered a contest to win a walk-on role on that retro-licious TV show, “Mad Men”… but I need your vote to win!

If you don’t mind taking a couple of seconds to vote for me, click the link below – it will take you right to my picture.

http://madmencastingcall.amctv.com/browse/detail/EZ3MBH

Thanks a bunch!

However, Lola does have a point in that the writers had originally wanted Christina Hendricks to play the piano to acompany the song which she doesn’t play and so she offered to play the accordion which she already knew.

The piano is an instrument that would be played by those in the higher echelons of society but given what we know of Joan’s background, she cannot be rich if she has had to pull herself up through the ranks of the secretarial pool, the writers choosing the accordion may have at first been out of convenience but it seems a much more suitable choice given the additional layer that it adds to Joan’s character.

Please keep in mind that my site is quite explicit about what it is and why, and if you’re not interested in my particular perspective, there are plenty of other things for you to read on the internet.

I’m only leaving your comment up because it represents several common perspectives about cultural and artistic analysis that I’d like to disabuse:

1) Whatever the artist/creator did or wanted is The Truth about how the work should be interpreted (i.e., authorial intent); and
2) Elements of a work of art are just there because they are there and/or because the creator of the work coincidentally felt like putting them there, bearing no further analysis.

Yes, Christina Hendricks obviously plays the accordion. I don’t know enough about her life story to speculate upon why or how she learned it. However, I’m sure Christina Hendricks has plenty of other talents or hobbies that the Mad Men producers and writers in theory could exploit: maybe she’s an awesome basketball player, or was a child prodigy on the piano, or whatever (I’m just making things up–I don’t know whether she is either of these things or not).

But there’s a reason that the Mad Men writers and producers chose to have her play the accordion on the show, rather than show off her layup skills or play something on the piano, and there’s a reason that they had her play the specific song that she played. She could have easily played polka, or vallenato, or tango, or rake-n-scrape, or an Irish jig–there are plenty of types of music that use accordion and its cousins.

Instead, they had Joan play an instrument, and a piece on that instrument, that were, and continue to be, very specifically coded with respect to class and ethnicity. Given Matthew Weiner’s famous, nearly-insane attention to detail, this is not coincidence. Nor is it coincidence that this scene took place in the context of an episode about social climbing in 1960s white America. If Christina Hendricks’ skill on the accordion were not relevant to these thematic priorities of the show, she would not have been asked to play it in that episode.

So, in conclusion:
1) When a cigar shows up, especially on Mad Men (where everything is coded), ask why it’s there and what it represents.
2) If you think ethnomusicology is nonsense, there’s no need for you to read a blog by an ethnomusicologist.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

A definite great read..Jim Bean