The Matusewitch Project

[Randy Stein]

"Boris Matusewitch (1918-1978) was a successful English concertinist in the United States. The history of the Matusewitch’s and their music is detailed in a special 2015 supplement to Concertina World written by Boris’s son, Eric Matusewitch (CW 463, September 2015). In addition to being a well-known performer, Boris taught concertina in his New York City music studio for over 20 years. Boris arranged many famous tunes specifically for the English concertina, writing the arrangements out by hand to give his students more classical and contemporary music to play. Many of these arrangements have been collected by Boris’s son, Eric, and one of Boris’s former students, Randy Stein (moi), a well known concertinist in the Washington, DC, area.

Eric and Randy are currently working with Mary Roth and Laura Wu to make Boris’s arrangements available to concertina players and to find a permanent archival home for Boris Matusewitch’s music arrangements. Mary is an English concertina player, a member of JTD, and a professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and Laura is an accordionist and student at Lafayette.  The project involves indexing the music, digital scanning the arrangements, researching potential archival homes for the physical copies of the music, and making applications to those archives."*

The scans of some of this music are now available to the public. Only those pieces of music that are currently in the public domain are accessable. Copyrighted songs are currently unavailable. There are still many of Boris' manuscripts yet to be scanned and made accessible but here is what is available to date. Mary is also working with the ICA to make them available via their website as well.

https://sites.lafayette.edu/boris-matusewitch/

On a personal note I want to thank Mary and Laura for their hard work and dedication to seeing this to become a reality. I had the gift of studying with both Boris and his brother Sergei. The musicianship and breadth of knowledge and legacy of Boris is still uncompared by any concertina player I have heard to date. As we make this music available, I hope this inspires the next generation of English Concertina players. 

 

*excerpt from upcoming JTD Newsletter

Edited May 29, 2019 by Randy Stein
Word change

[Gerard]

This is good news indeed. Thanks to all involved in making Boris' manuscripts more available.

Gerry Bogaard