The concertina, a member of free-reed musical instruments, is invented by Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) around 1829 and 1830 in the United Kingdom. Wheatstone was originally trained a physicist, but after being brought up to the United Kingdom by his uncle, a musical instrument maker, and saw all the instruments in the free-reed instrument family, he started designing concertina. Concertina contains buttons on both sides, working by expanding and contracting bellow in the middle. This easily-mastered new instrument was a success in the nineteenth century. The English concertina was considered as an instrument that was played among upper-class society. Because it was easy to learn, portable, largely produced, and frequently played in the music halls, the concertina gained popularity among the English working class bands and even in Russia in the nineteenth century. However, the popularity rapidly declined in the beginning of the twentieth century due to the rise of other instruments such as accordions and pianos and the advent of new media technologies such as radio and telegraphs. Until the 1960s, a modest but continuing renewal of interest in the concertina arose within Britain’s folk music, thus bringing this instrument back on stage of history.
The Matusewitch family moved from Minsk, Belarus to New York, the United States. Gregory Matusewitch was the first generation of immigrant. He concertinized in Russia and some other countries in Europe before he moved his family to the United States in 1923. Boris Matusewitch, as Gregory’s younger son, was a successful concertinist and the teacher of the instrument. In his many years of teaching and playing concertina, he arranged a lot of famous tunes specifically applied for English concertina and hand-wrote the music notes on music sheets. In the 1990s, the role of archives was largely settled, involving a range of seemingly objective tasks. They were “institutions that have a responsibility to preserve documents and objects that reflect individual and collective endeavors and that have had an impact on culture and society at national, regional, and local levels.” In relation to contemporary music, the society started to put more efforts on curation and preservation of popular music artifacts. Boris’ handwritten concertina arrangements are left with his son Eric Matusewitch and his former student, Randy Stein. To better preserve these valuable music and also to make the arrangements available to concertina players, Eric and Randy are hoping to archive Boris’ arrangements.