Accordion · 6 min read

What is a bayan?

The bayan is a B-system chromatic button accordion with dry tuning, deep cassotto and a free-bass converter. Here is what sets it apart and what it plays.

2026-05-26

Where the name comes from

The instrument is named after Boyan, the legendary bard invoked in the medieval Russian epic The Tale of Igor's Campaign. The name was attached to a chromatic button instrument in the early twentieth century, around 1907, in the circle of Saint Petersburg makers and players developing the concert form of the Russian garmon. Pyotr Sterligov is generally credited with building the instruments for the player Yakov Orlansky-Titarenko, who used the name publicly.

Before that, Russia had the garmon and its relatives, diatonic instruments with regional tunings that gave different notes on push and pull. The bayan is fully chromatic and unisonoric, which is the technical way of saying that a button gives the same note in both bellows directions. That change is what allowed the instrument to cross from the village into the conservatory.

What makes it a bayan and not just a button accordion

Three things, and none of them is decorative. The right hand uses the B-system, where the chromatic scale ascends by minor thirds along each of the three main rows, arranged as the mirror image of the C-system used in France and Italy. Add the two duplicate rows and you have five, giving several fingerings for every passage.

The tuning is dry. Where a musette accordion has two or three middle reed ranks deliberately detuned against each other to produce a shimmering beat, a bayan has its ranks tuned together to the cent. The result is clean, straight and slightly severe, which is exactly what polyphony needs. Bach played on a wobbling musette is a specialised taste.

The reeds themselves are typically larger and mounted in a deep cassotto, a wooden resonance chamber inside the body that the sound passes through before it escapes. Concert bayans like the Jupiter instruments built in Moscow are famous for a low register that sounds closer to a pipe organ than to a dance-band accordion.

The left hand and the converter

Most accordions have a Stradella left hand: rows of single bass notes and preset major, minor, seventh and diminished chords. Excellent for accompaniment, hopeless for a fugue, because you cannot choose the individual notes of a chord or its voicing.

A concert bayan has a converter. Flip a lever and the same buttons stop producing preset chords and become a chromatic single-note keyboard covering several octaves, laid out in the same logic as the right hand. That is free bass, and it turns the instrument into a genuine two-manual polyphonic instrument. It is the single feature that made a serious original repertoire possible.

Converter instruments are heavier and much more expensive, because the bass machine has to do two jobs. A student bayan without a converter is still a fine instrument for folk and popular music.

The repertoire

The bayan has an original concert literature that most people outside the accordion world have never heard, and it is not a thin one. Vladislav Zolotaryov, who died in 1975 at thirty three, wrote the Partita, the Children's Suites and the Chamber Suite, and effectively proved the instrument could carry serious structural weight. Sofia Gubaidulina wrote De Profundis in 1978 and later Fachwerk and Under the Sign of Scorpio, treating the bellows as a source of breath and noise rather than just pressure.

Beyond that there is a large body of work by Semionov, Kusyakov, Vlasov and Derbenko, plus the transcription tradition: Bach, Scarlatti, Rameau, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Franck organ works. Players like Friedrich Lips built careers on this material and commissioned much of it.

And the folk side never went away. Russian wedding and village playing, the fast variation sets on tunes like Korobeiniki, the accompaniment of song repertoire: the bayan does that work too, often in the same evening.

Should you start on one

If your goal is the classical repertoire and you have access to a teacher who plays the B-system, yes. If you learn the system, the fingering patterns repeat across all keys and you get a range no piano accordion can match at the same weight. If your goal is French musette or a covers band, a bayan is the wrong shape of instrument, and its dry tuning will sound thin in that context.

The practical limit outside Eastern Europe is supply and teaching. Good converter instruments are rare and expensive, and the second-hand market is thin. We keep a few chromatic instruments at A&G Academy in Singapore for exactly this reason, because trying one for an hour settles the question faster than a month of reading about it.

Frequently asked

What is the difference between a bayan and an accordion?

A bayan is a type of accordion: the Russian chromatic button accordion. It differs from a typical piano accordion in three ways. It has buttons in the B-system rather than keys, it is tuned dry with no musette wobble, and a concert model has a converter that turns the left hand into a free-bass keyboard.

Why does a bayan sound darker than a normal accordion?

Two reasons. The reed ranks are tuned exactly together instead of being detuned against each other, which removes the shimmering beat of musette tuning. And the reeds usually sit in a deep cassotto, a resonance chamber inside the body that filters the sound before it leaves, rounding the tone toward something organ-like.

Is the bayan hard to learn?

The first months are slower than on a piano accordion because the buttons offer no visual landmarks and the B-system takes time to internalise. After that it gets easier, since fingering patterns repeat identically in every key. Free-bass playing is a separate skill that usually starts after a few years of Stradella.


Learning or buying in Singapore?

A&G Academy teaches accordion, bayan and double bass, and sells the instruments we teach on. Ask us anything — we'd rather talk you out of the wrong instrument than sell you one.

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